It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.
The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.
Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:
1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:
2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)
3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.
How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:
A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.
A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.
So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.
To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.
TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?
And that's an oversimplification of what happened in Spain. Grid-following systems shut down for safety reasons when there was no grid to follow.
Wind and solar systems can be configured in a grid-forming capacity, but the ones in Spain weren't.
Wind farms make money whenever the marginal producer of electricity is a higher cost producer. AKA basically all the time.
It is solved.
Grid-scale batteries are being mass-produced today.
It will continue to get even better, but it is reasonably well solved even now.
I would LOVE for this to be the case, however. Adding this again so that I am not lumped together with the coal thumpers.
What exists, TO BE BUILT that is, is battery farms, sure, but they are nowhere nere big enough. They are nowhere nere close enough to compensate the factor applied to wind farm energy generation. But let's hope good progress can be made in the accumulation aspect of intermittent energy production.
Once wind/solar/batteries reaches about 90-95% of production, it'll become harder economically and technically to increase that number. I'd love to have that problem, we're far from 90% today.
Throughout my life the cost of renewable energy generation and storage has been dropping exponentially whilst growing in capability.
That’s been happening for decades now.
The cost of fossil fuels just keeps rising with spikes every time someone starts a war.
Fossil fuels are already far more expensive. In 10 years no one will consider them seriously and in 20 years they’ll be a specialist novelty used by museums to run classic cars.
Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.
If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"
Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?
Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.
The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)
The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.
It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.
And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)
* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".
The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).
I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.
I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.
If you're generating 4x to 5x your required energy in summer you don't need to store that energy for whole winter. You can get away with generating 5x less energy and still have what you actually need each day.
When solar panels become cheaper than roof slates it's going to become a no brainer to over provision regardless of the ability to store it. I'm talking about a world where panels cost a 10th of what they do currently.
You can also still use the grid to pull base load from other sources such as nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydro or tidal power. It's not either or, they work together.
Relying on fossil fuels that have to be transported by ship at the whims of madmen is just stupid from a security point of view and that's before we even talk about what it's doing to the planet.
Trump has been running down his strategic fuel reserve since he came to power. That's before he started his latest war. At some point he's likely to stop exporting fuel as a consequence of that.
Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive and the sooner we can stop burning them the better.
As solar and batteries become even cheaper (we're already at the point where they're cheaper than anything else) we can just choose to overbuild capacity and turn down/off whatever other generation isn't necessary at any given time. Utilities already have to predict grid usage based on weather and all sorts of other factors, so it's not like this isn't something that isn't already happening.
And no, I have no problem with renewables either.
If your conclusion from reading what you said is this, then you did not read because I said the exact opposite.
China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it
If you don't believe me, run the numbers of how many kg of lithium batteries China would need to supply an entire week of energy in the middle of winter (all energy, not just current electricity demand, because in this scenario we're assuming everything is 100% electrified).
Also if you're potentially going to be fighting a war, you need more energy, not less, and it's even more important for it to be reliable year-round.
This is why China is doing what they're doing, they're not idiots and they know that wishful thinking is not a strategy
Output in the latter case will be under 10% of full power and probably under 5%.
It’s not bullshit it’s just physics, which is why the world looks like it does and not like the world you’re describing
This opinion is rather simplistic. China is reported to have 60% of it's energy needs already supplied by renewable sources, but this transition creates different types of challenges such as preserving the power grid's inertia. Otherwise you might see yourself in a scenario such as the Spanish blackout. This means having in place strategies for fast response (gas) and baseline (hydro storage, nuclear) to prevent the scenario.
Batteries have a limited capacity and have a higher investment cost. Gas is the standard option for fast response. Pumped-storage hydro has by far the highest capex and has a heavy environment impact.
It's baffling how people show up in this sort of discussions arguing that standard tried-and-true strategies somehow don't work. Quite odd.