Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Storage at immense scales that are not remotely possible with our current technology. What are we going to do to fu

Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Storage at immense scales that are not remotely possible with our current technology. What are we going to do to fulfill electricity demand at night, which is actually when peak consumption occurs? With solar and wind, the answer is that we keep burning fossil fuels. California and Germany still get 50-60% of their electricity from fossil fuels despite large investments in solar and wind power. Hypothetically it's possible to get below that with energy storage. But the amount of capacity it would require to make that possible is immense. We'd need 12 hours of storage to get to 80% renewables and 3 weeks of storage to get to 100% renewables [1]. By comparison the US has ~5 minutes of storage currently, most of it in the form of hydroelectric storage which is geographically limited. By comparison, France has been using nuclear power as its primary energy source for close to half a century at this point. Its carbon intensity is far lower than Germany's despite lower energy costs. The cynical reality is that you're right: solar and wind make sense from a political perspective. Low cost, rapid installation time. The fact that it's a dead end won't surface until well after the current generation of politicians' terms are up. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...