Solar doesn't produce energy at night, Wind doesn't produce energy when the wind doesn't blow.
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My personal opinion is that the grid will have to get a lot smarter to realize the benefits of cheap solar, and that home power distribution and appliances will have to get smarter.
Fossil fuels should be incentivized away as quickly as possible.
And no strip-mining fortunately. Just drilling, pump down some warm water, hydrates dissolve and natural gas starts flowing. Pipeline to land and voila.
We need to decarbonize as quickly as possible.
Every time someone says "Fracking gives us 100 years of reserves", they always omit at what price. If most of that is cost-effective at $120 or $140 / barrel, is it really fair to suggest that's a good reserve?
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To be clear, I'm not in love with coal; I'd much rather have a mostly solar powered grid, but I think it will be more expensive and complicated to get there than just "put some solar on it"
When solar wins some percent of the total market (20%?, 40%?; I don't know) then things get complicated. Immediately obvious is the fact that generation is tied to sunlight, so when it is dark out due to rain or nighttime or shortened seasons, grid capacity will be reduced.
There are other issues besides production though. Generators with great big spinning metal shafts currently (heh) control the frequency of alternating current power that we use in our homes. Direct Current Inverters can mimic the A/C sine wave, but it's not exactly the same.
It's great to have batteries or other storage, but will you have storage equivalent to 20 or 40% of grid capacity? Or will you have to make hard decisions about how to apportion energy?
Maybe you think everyone should have a home energy storage point? Sure, that's great. Do you think that should be mandatory or voluntary?
Think about the consequences of each of these decisions. Think about what you are asking your neighbors to do. Think about the goals of grid operators and how they might reach them.
Some places use batteries to provide frequency stabilization for cheaper than the spinning metal they used to use. Odd that you would pick one of the most cost-effective use-cases of utility-sized batteries as an example.
Do you have a source that talks about frequency stabilization in particular?
BTW you might also note that HVDC and DC-to-DC interconnects are becoming popular. If your theory about batteries being bad for frequency stabilization were true, they'd also be big problems.
I'm not an electrical engineer, so all of this has been my lightly informed opinion. I don't have the right words or depth of knowledge to convey my impressions, sorry.
I don't know about big problems, but there are certainly complications and concerns when converting DC to AC at grid scale, as you can see in the Disadvantages portion of the wiki. Sorry I don't have a better source.
I don't think batteries are "bad" for frequency stabilization, I just don't think they're good at it.
With regard to spinning metal, I think you may be referring to flywheel storage? Flywheels do have lower energy density than batteries. I was referring to base load generation by spinning generators.
I was referring to the same thing you were with "spinning metal". At the top of this thread, you said "great big spinning metal shafts".
Anyway, storage is getting cheaper. Coal’s dead. By the time current capacity goes off line, renewables will have won.
Even of you don’t believe that, nuclear is a far better option.
No one should be building out new coal capacity.
It makes much less sense for other countries with less access to natural gas.
There is never a time when the wind doesn't blow on some part of the interconnected grid. If the wind stops everywhere at once, there's a much larger problem at hand.