> Wind and solar are quite unreliable. That's the dirty secret. It's not a secret, that's what most people say. But is it true? Take a look at the graphs in [

> Wind and solar are quite unreliable. That's the dirty secret. It's not a secret, that's what most people say. But is it true? Take a look at the graphs in [1] with monthly electricity generation by source in the US. You will notice that renewable electricity generation is a bit jagged, but not a lot. The ratio between the highs and the lows may be 1.3, but it's certainly not 7 or 15 as you imply. The thing about 7% of the nameplace capacity counting towards peak availability is a red herring. Power companies can keep natural gas plants. Those are very cheap (about $1000/kw of nameplate capacity, on par with solar, but obviously without intermittency issues). They don't need to run them all the time, 5-10% of the time will be enough. Overbuilding renewables by a huge factor to supposedly be allowed to earn 8-10% is a nice conspiracy theory, but assumes they'll find people to sell to at a profit. When you generate many times what people consume, you'll eventually need to pay others to take the electricity from you (yes, negative prices are a thing in the power markets). [1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_4.pdf https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_4.pdf