> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.

A continental-scale mix (wind, solar...) is an efficient way to reduce the impact of intermittency on electricity production, and therefore storage ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ).

V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.

There is a good chance that with present day technology we could satisfy all of our energy needs using HVDC transmission lines. The main problem is that these are going to be easy infrastructure to attack in case of war or through terrorism.

True, however continental-scale grids interconnecting more and more interdependent nations/states are needed whatever the type of energy source used (even nuclear), and at least as exposed to terrorism as long-haul (U)HVDC lines.

>> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive.

Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself.

>> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half.

Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.

Gas can't compete, because gas is too expensive. Coal actually could compete, it usually was the second type of power plant able to sell on the electricity markets, becasue CO2 certificates are just dirt cheap, way to cheap to move the needle, and coal as fuel was the least expensive (sun and win being free).

Sun and wind aren't 'free' but they have the lowest operating costs compared to alternatives and they have the lowest capital cost per W of installed power. But you probably should account for a storage component as well once those hit deployment in volume. I'm holding out for the next generation of storage batteries and then I'll pull the trigger on a system large enough to do both arbitrage and cover the day/night cycle of this house for a week. That works out to 70 to 100 KWh of storage, which is right now both too expensive to make sense (we still have net metering here) and a safety concern. But I expect the next generation storage to both be substantially cheaper and safer than what's out there today.

True, sun and wind aren't free. In terms of energy markets (too lazy to look up the up to dtae details, so it might have changed in the last 5 years), only the variable costs for producing one kWh of electricity are taking into account (so basically fuel plus CO2 certificates, over simplified a bit). In that sense, sun and wind are free. Don't ask me why fix costs aren't considered...

Grid stabilization is priced in, usually using specific contracts with producers and large consumers (read steel, chemical, paper industrial sites and other with huge electricity needs). In that regard, the European markets are working fine and as intended.

Long term, we have to solve the issue of electricity storage. Short term, we are totally fine with renewables producing <60% of our electricity, and on some days even more. Base load became much less of a problem, most hige consumers in the industrial sectors found ways to be much more flexible in their demand, driven in no small degree by being to make extra money on the spot markets (and we talk 10s of millions here).

Yes, consumer flexibility will be a huge part of the solution. You can already see this with power intensive industries operating when power is cheap (or even on surplus power) and reducing or even stopping their output when power is expensive. Obviously not all industries have this option, sometimes energy is only a small fraction of their expenses. But it is good to see at least this part of the market aspect of energy production and consumption operating as it should. Meanwhile I'm sitting pretty with 7.7 MWh net returned to the grid on my private installation.

Lucky you, we lookes at PV when we built our house. But back then, well, we just didn't have the necessary 15k left for an installation. As soon as we get an EV, for now the required size for four people is just to expensive, there will be PV installed alongside a wall box. Our roof is large enough, albeit propably tricky (almost flat, but not completely, covered by bitumen). But we'll see!

Flat roof is very doable, I have 34 out of 50 panels here on less than 10 degree slope on a flat roof. What's nice about it is that even though it isn't optimal when the sun is out it works very well when the sky is overcast, sometimes even better than the panels that are oriented towards the sun.

Good news! And since our house is pretty much running north-south, with an unobstructed view of the sun until around, say, mid-afternoon, the aide of our roof facing east should be quite suitable (to get more sun on it, we'd have to remove all the trees, moat of which are 30+ years old, something we don't want to do). One day, there will panels on that roof!

Neat, if you need any mounting tips let me know, I've had a few 'trial-and-error' runs at it.

as things are, that'll take a while (as in years!), but I'll come back to it!

CO2 certificates are not "dirt cheap", for Polish coal-based power plants they amount to 59% of the cost of producing electricity.

Still cheap enough to make coal one of the cheapest source on electricity markets, measured in generation cost per kWh. Since coal is the dirtiest fuel we have, those certificates should be expebsive enough to price out coal most of the time. That would be an ingenious combination of setting incenzives for market players im way that the result of market activities benefits everyone.

Then we'll ramp up production over the next few years. It's already happening at a phenomenal rate [0]. The world does not need vast amounts of storage in 2023: the goal for the next decade should be to build out renewables from 1% to ~50% of production everywhere, and to use storage mostly to smooth out the demand curve (which is currently highly profitable and happening quickly in places like CA [1].)

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...

No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?

> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.

> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.

Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

I frequently hear that talking point (about Germany) from my fellow Czechs, and it's incredible, because we need more fossil fuels than Germans and also are poorer. (Even more paradoxically, more than a decade back, Czechia was ahead of Germany in solar power.) The conservatives have just taken over.

Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible.

No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.

Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar

According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.