Can you realistically overbuild solar and wind in a way that works in winter? Here's Terence Eden in the UK, and his graph of rooftop solar[1] showing peak around 400kWh/month in summer and trough around 50kWh/month in darkest December - that's a difference of ~8x which might be possible...

But that's averaged over the month, what about a run of December days with heavy cloud cover, misty foggy atmosphere, still air, maybe some Icelandic volcano soot in the atmosphere, what's the worst we'd have to plan for, and how much overprovisioning would that take?

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/solar-update/

FWIW I have updated stats at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/3-years-of-domestic-solar-s...

They're also published as open data.

The dark and dreary days tend to be the ones with the most wind power. The tides around our coast are in constant motion.

But, the big challenge is still storage. Domestic solar panels provide 100% of our yearly electricity use. At the moment I can only store 4.8kWh of excess.

So we need to over provision and over store - hopefully both at the same time.

Wind is anticorrelated to sun and stronger in the north.

https://globalwindatlas.info/en

Same author: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap...

In the UK, given it's northern latitude and great wind resources, you'd be best overbuilding mostly wind.

Here's a worked example based on real weather data that suggests a wind capacity of double peak demand and converting about 8% of all demand with power-to-X would be the the low cost option.

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

That's absolutely true, but the economic argument still carries weight. How many acres of land, how many rare earth minerals, etc. are required to produce the load profile you need with batteries and renewables vs including baseload flat generation from nuclear? This is still an economic question but very relevant.

Literally no "rare earth minerals" are used in production of solar or batteries. Exactly zero.

Nor in wind turbines, if you don't use permanent magnet generators.