Yes, the mythical cloudy days with no wind over large extensions that basically never happen.
Right now where I live, we are "enduring" our third week without seeing the sun. Cloudy day after cloudy day, non stop rain (i.e. more hydro). But to nobody surprise, we are also enjoying our third week with continuous wind, and the electricity is often at 0.03 the kWh: virtually free.
I'm not saying that an occasional day cloudy but without wind cannot happen. But in real world, cloudy almost always means windy where the turbines are.
It happens regularly in winter in Europe, there were several instances just last winter where wind power was under 10% capacity for over a week. Good luck building that much storage for that long.
It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source to debunk your disinformation about grid balancing and aggregation.
It's not rare for Europe to have no wind throughout vast land areas for days, affecting most countries at once. Same for solar.
Securing a low-carbon base load is critical and nuclear is basically the only option in most places. I'm saddened by the fact we're still arguing about this in 2023, while Germany casually unloads megatons of CO₂eq each month burning coal and gas, and actively slows down the development of cleaner energy through its EU seat.
> It takes anyone one minute to check ElectricityMap or an equivalent historical data source
Those data are about the current fleet of wind turbines production, not sufficient when it comes to determine whether a continental-scale fleet (which doesn't exist yet) could reduce the resources needed to solve this challenge.
Storage (V2G, hydro...) and clean backup (green hydrogen produced during overproduction periods and burnt in turbo-alternators during under-production periods...) will complete this approach.
Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful. Hydro storage is dependent on geography, and most locations are already tapped. Battery storage is much more expensive than nuclear, and requires astronomical amounts of precious mined resources.
> Storage will not complete anything in time to be useful
You have a case here, however this is even truer for nuclear reactors, especially considering the known uranium reserves (max 2 hundred years for the existing fleet).
Hydro: yes, it is not negligible (robust, vasts amounts of energy, low inertia, flexible...), especially as continental grids are quickly progressing.
Battery storage is a prerequisite for transport (Electrical Vehicles), this considerably reduces public investments. About mined resources the challenge is to ramp up mining, moreover substitutes and recycling will reduce the pressure.
Case: https://twitter.com/_HannahRitchie/status/161094857979065549...
It was running properly when it was shut down. Development had it issues, but they were mostly sorted out when the entirely political decision to shut it down was taken.
Any time there is a high pressure weather system in winter, you have cold still weather. Solar of course doesn't produce much either in that case, as it's winter.
Virtually everyone is replacing fossil with solar and wind. In Spain or UK coal is gone. In Europe coal went from 30% to 15% since 2000, wind + solar went from 0% to 25% in the same timespan. All of it while nuclear is also falling.
But of course you bring up the only one case in the world that net replaced nuclear with coal. And you "support" your claim with a graph that shows coal and nuclear falling and being replaced with solar and eolic, and Germany using less absolute dirty energy than 20 years ago despite doubling production.
You've moved, at least, from literally nobody to virtually nobody.
On the nobody side there's South Australia which has had long periods of fully renewable energy supply to residents with excess energy being exported to neighbouriong states, and currently stands at fully 70% renewable supply (including to heavy industry) which isn't too bad given they have alumina smelters and other massive power sucks.
Remind me what's the population density australia ? And how much sunlight do they get ?
Of course if your country is a literal flat desert getting 2-4x the sun it's a bit easier to make it work, for anything north of Maghreb it's game over, too many people, too energy dense, not enough sun.
* Australia's population is seriously urban, to the point of ridicule by Jack Davis[1] who referred to the european descedents as "fringedwellers" for their habit of clinging to the fringes of the continent in a few very large cities - you'd be wanting to look to the population density figures for Sydney / Melbourne to get a sense of how the majority of Australians live
* More importantly the energy demands of Australia, the country, are quite different to the energy demands of the Australian people - as a bulk exporter of raw materials the bulk of energy used in Australia goes towards goods used by an very large number of others in the world poplation. By way of example, W.Australia a single state with a population of 2 million exports 16x more iron ore every year than than the USofA ever achieved in a single year - this goes towards a being a major percentage of the global demand for steel.
* You're looking more for the kind of figure that relates to the energy demands for the size of the market served and less to the energy demands of the few individuals that happen to live nearby.
> And how much sunlight do they get ?
This is, of course, irrelevant for the question of the example I gave, Adelaide in South Australia. They do not use the total sunlight that falls on the total area of the country of Australia. That project uses the sunlight that falls just outside a city on the 35th parallel south which gets the same amount of sunlight as a city on the 35th parallel north.
That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point: Australia has a bunch more empty land than Europe. Which is true but not that important, as Europe has plenty of land to build renewables on, and quite often the reason for "lack of land" in Europe is political, not geographic - Germany is a particularly famous example, with absurdly restrictive zoning restrictions on wind turbines, based on pseudoscience.
> That said, I think this misses the parent comment's point
My answer might appear to have but I knew what they were attempting to convey under their attitude. I chose to address a few other important considerations.
Leaving that aside, Australia might be back on track to export sunlight via cable to Singapore.
The distance and the technology don't concern me nearly as much as the route; it's a hotbed of faults, a few deep trenches, and prone to earthquakes and volcanoes.
I also question the implied snub of Indonesia - they have a very large population and might appreciate some power, Australia may also benefit from the diplomacy aspects also.
Also, depending where you are in the world, days get awfully short in winter.