| None of this is true. Solar definitely does drop to zero every night and no, we don't have the connectivity, or the land-mass, to have sunshine somewhere all the time. Russia does...but well, Russia. There is not "literally always wind". And we've had several days of "Dunkelflaute" in Germany per year now, much higher than anyone predicted. Renewable advocates like to average over time, so having too much energy at some point in time (which makes the energy worthless and prices go negative, as in "please stop feeding energy into the grid, it's harmful!!") and having too little at other times averages out. As my statistics professor used to joke: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg in boiling fat, you are enjoying a nearly perfect mean temperature. Variance matters. And so the real world does not work the way renewable advocates would like, and no, we don't have nearly the storage to make that work, nor a credible way to create such storage at remotely affordable prices, never mind the horrific environmental impact of that much battery production. > There's enough countries out there that have been using renewables consistently for years Nope. One example that is frequently cited is Denmark, but they themselves say that this is only possible because they are a tiny country with lots of neighbours with reliable electricity supply from whom they can purchase when they need it. They also have more interconnect with those neighbouring countries than typical total demand. This is not a model for other countries, particularly not for larger countries. > The sun is always shining somewhere. This is simply not true. > For Germany in particular it was a mistake to move away from nuclear Absolutely. Probably the biggest political mistake of the after-war period. |