[KptMarchewa]

Renewables haven't solved storage in any way. You need to solve for worst case - December, with barely any sun and barely any increase of wind.

You can produce 300% or even 3000% of need in the middle of day in June or July and it still does not mean pure renewable fantasy is feasible.

Meanwhile France's overall CO2 per capita is small fraction of Germany one and was for decades.

[_hypx]

This problem can be solved by making hydrogen. So there is a way to power society with renewables if you are willing accept the need for baseload power. Of course, renewable energy fanatics do not accept this fact, and often are ideologically opposed to hydrogen. This is in spite of the fact that only hydrogen can save renewables from this problem.

[pjc50]

> This problem can be solved by making hydrogen

Again, nobody seems to be making hydrogen from renewable energy at scale yet despite there being a real industrial market for it. Including steel reduction, which would be a great use-case! But it's not happening because water cracking to hydrogen has a really high capital cost.

[_hypx]

Again, you are simply unaware of what is happening. It is very similar to how anti-solar analysts simply failed to recognize the widespread deployment of PV panels around a decade ago.

[AnimalMuppet]

A pointer to some documentation about what is happening would be useful - more useful than an analogy about something in history.

[_hypx]

The reference is literally google news search: https://www.google.com/search?q=green+hydrogen&tbm=nws&sa=X&...

You'll get hundreds if not thousands of references.

[AnimalMuppet]

So this is a pet peeve of mine. I can google that as easily as you can. But:

1. You made the claim. It's appropriate that you do the work to back it up.

2. A post is read more times than it is written. If you (the author) do the work, the work gets done once. If we, the readers, do the work, it's done multiple times.

So both efficiency and "burden of proof" say that you should do that search. In fact, you should have done it about 10 or 20 posts earlier.

[KptMarchewa]

Small scale research papers are not reality. Where are the gigawatt-sized installations?

[bryanlarsen]

With a 20% overbuild, 4 hours of storage and good interconnections, an intelligent mix of wind & solar power can supply 97% of power requirements.

I hardly think that the last 3% being horribly expensive should hold up the first 97%.

[KptMarchewa]

Maybe in California, weather does not look uniform in the rest of the world. December is literally less than 30 hours of sun here, and wind is weak - we're literally smog capital of Europe due to it in the winter.

"good interconnections" on the other way sound like surrendering any energy security - good luck with that after russian invasion.

I'd be comfortable with that as long as we can have 3-10x overbuild and a week of storage.

[bryanlarsen]

If you can't rely on an interconnection with Spain then you have bigger problems than energy security.