Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do not have anything close to the storage necessary.
Land issues? Seriously?
The land issue for solar is a non-issue, it's like fake hand-wringing by the oil astroturfers over birds and windmills when skyscrapers kill 100xs more birds. There's this type of land called desert. Also, there is this thing called roofs where modern solar panels only need a small part of the roof to do a suburban house or apartment building including recharging your EV.
The land issue for wind is even less on an issue:
As for wind, I don't know if you've seen windmills on farms but... yeah, the pole doesn't take up much space. Then there is offshore wind. Windmills can integrate with existing use land (why not nature preserves?), you don't need to dedicate acreage to windmill farms.
Meanwhile, fusion reactors have a wee bit of problems with neutrons flying everywhere and turning the reactor vessels slightly radioactive from neutron capture. Maybe they'll fix that with good absorption spectrum elements, but let's not pretend fusion is 100% clean.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
But again, the promise is there for fusion and LFTR/"new" fission. Keep the research, maybe the economics will turn around. Industry sure would need it to fully decarbonize, or, heck, space colonies. Or flying cars! Or any of the other sci-fi stuff we have given up on.
Right now we have an existential threat from GW, and an actual industrialized / productized and economic path is right there: wind and solar. That's what we need money printing for.
To power the US energy needs, you need an area about the size of New Jersey. Also roughly equivalent to the area taken up by roads. The interstate highway system alone has been cited as the largest public works project in history, and that's "just" asphalt.
Look, any new nuclear or fusion project won't turn on for a decade. Given that even with inflation wind/solar STILL dropped in LCOE cost last year, and still likely has technological and economies of scale, you REALLY think a 10 year out fusion or nuclear project will launch at a price competitive with what even solar/wind + storage will be?
Solar/wind likely will be half the inflation adjusted cost it currently is now even with storage in 10 years.
LFP batteries are coming on the market now for storage that are half what lithium ion cost. Sodium will be release by CATL later this year or next. I'm not handwaving anything.
There is a LOT of roof real estate. A fair amount more than the interstate system. The costs are already pushing wind/solar to deploy as fast as it can be made, it basically is a production scaling problem.
New Jersey is not a large state, given we have west texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and lots of other desert. Which we don't need, because of rooftops and wind.
Storage isn't solved, land space isn't solved, efficiency isn't solved, just like fusion isn't a solved problem.
Sure, once storage is solved it will be a non-issue. But it is not currently solved, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I also never brought up land issues; I agree that it's not a real problem.
TL;DR we need to be realistic about the capabilities of solar + wind. You argue that storage will solve itself. Your sibling argues that we don't need storage at all.
The reality is that storage is a huge issue right now. It's the #1 technical issue stopping us from shutting down coal and natural gas plants.
So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.
Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.
"Not cost-effective to be the majority of power production while CO2 pollution is free." is very different from "near useless".
But I am not claiming there is any cost benefit at all - alI am claiming it's doable, and we will have zero or negative electricity price on windy days, that coupd be put to good use for electrolysis, hydrogen production, etc.