Remember, we're talking about a world where building renewables to 4x peak demand would be actually economical.
This works on the same principle as an insurance market: it's likely that even at 4x capacity, your local solar farm has a few cloudy days. It's highly unlikely that your entire regional grid generation falls below demand. That probability falls (super?-)exponentially in the size of the region.
Taking a step back: yes, renewable power is intermittent and you need electricity here, now. Either 1) transmit from elsewhere, 2) store locally, or 3) supplement with a stable source (nuclear / thermal). The choice simply comes down to cost (to provide a given level of reliability).
The most efficient solution is likely to do all of the above, taking local conditions into account. Adjusting for local conditions is one thing that a (well-managed) market helps tackle.
When it’s night in Germany, it’s night in the rest of Europe.
When there is no wind in Germany, there isn’t usually much more wind across Europe.
Please take some look at actual electricity generating data for Germany (see smard.de) and find out why your assumptions are not correct.
Also have a look here https://www.windy.com/?46.529,20.479,4 and look at the variation across Europe, especially if you include offshore wind.
Like a belt of solar panels around the equator? Works for Dyson Sphere Program but that's a game. As big as the US is, for CONUS the entire continent is in the dark for significant portions of the day. It doesn't get more intermittent than that!
> and you have sufficient transmission,
Well duh. And assuming zero transmission loss. Or enough resources to overcome transmission loss and still be economically viable.
Quite a bit of hand waving there.
You don’t. If your plant is properly designed, you’re absolutely immune to any extreme weather conditions.
Heck, we have nuclear-powered vehicles sent beyond our galaxy and they’re still working.
Nuclear power is literally the only form of energy we have that can work under virtually all environmental conditions.
Nuclear fission works even in vacuum.
The problem with nuclear is we can't have it until we have eliminated corruption. In that industry it can lead to a literal nuclear meltdown.
and even then just "restarting" it, is not as easy as restarting software.
When people quote $1/W for solar generation it really should be $4/W because you have to build 4x as much and then add another ... infinite amount for increasing the size of the transmission system by 4x too so that areas that have sun can transmit to areas that have none. All possible just expensive.
In a decade, ERCOT will look nothing like it does today. It will have massive amounts of solar and storage, and even more wind. This is replacing gas plants as they age out.
Our CO2 goals won’t be compromised by running emergency power off fossil fuel once every decade or two.
Imagine a car that sits in a garage and once a decade you take it out and thrash it. Machines degrade just from time not necessarily wear as rubber and gaskets become brittle, metal rusts, capacitors leak, fuel degrades, algae grows, rats chew on whatever they can, shafts and bearings and motors seize or get flat spots from sitting.
Look at Texas and their fleet of plants that didn’t start when they were needed. Any machine that is not running is likely to stay not running.
This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through.
Barring future unknown tech, we will always need either nuclear or natural gas if we want five nines of uptime in our electrical power. There is just no practical way currently to build enough storage across the grid to maintain 100% uptime during a week or more of reduced renewable generation.