I have never quite understood how and why reliable energy should be produced from unreliable weather, and from what we gather climate change means the weather is going to become even more erratic.
You build in more than one spot, with enough capacity and energy storage to account for fluctuations.
The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim.
Well. That statement means every location needs to generate all power needed through both methods.
We already do this with other forms of energy production; coal, oil, and gas burning plants need to go down for maintenance, which means we build more capacity for that too.
Fans of wind and solar paper over this like it is no big deal.
When exactly can we expect to see this cheap, ubiquitous energy storage that will solve all of our intermittent generation problems?
Detractors of wind and solar like to pretend disingenously they're proposed in isolation by idiots, but that's hardly the case. You'll see hydro, nuclear, gas/biomass peaker plants, etc. in the mix, and you'll see overprovisioned capacity of the cheaper generation forms like wind and solar to account for seasonal or weather-related dips in production.
Sounds like Boomer thinking: we’ll just screw over those spoiled kids.
You can already get a home battery and enough solar to fill it. We’re already doing energy storage. As has happened with cellphones, EVs, solar, and wind, the more we do it, the cheaper it’ll be.
No one’s proposing nuking fossil fuel plants and going “oops better fix that”.
- diversify power generation among multiple classes of electricity generation: geothermal, running water (=dams), solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biogas/waste incineration, pumped-water storage.
- build large grids with ample transmission capacity on long lines. China for example has built multiple HVDC links spanning thousands of kilometers - enough to span the entire US.
- build out mesh grids. The more interconnections, the better the resilience against any kind of external shock.
- incentivize large consumers (=heavy industry) to build out the ability to weather outages - basically, pay them to go offline when needed. Yes, some processes (e.g. glass smelters) cannot be stopped without incurring severe damages, but a lot can.
- incentivize private consumers to invest in battery-backed fallbacks and solar panels on their roofs. A typical home runs at anything from 3-6 kWh - that's around 5.000€ for a battery that provides a day worth of regular electricity usage.
The addition of appropriate mitigations allows us to derive an energy source with the desired level of reliability. The cost of those mitigations (i.e. more storage required with erratic renewables) needs to then be traded off against other energy sources and the associated costs.