Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)
And even > 90% would be very expensive to achieve in winter in much of Europe (of course there are alternatives to solar so it’s not such a huge issue)
Of course, it frequently happens involuntarily, and just saying "get used to it" is pessimistic, as you say.
Both reflect the same thing: it's politically untenable to voluntarily accept poor reliability of electricity supply.
If we had one hour per day without power that would be about 95% availability. Most of us wouldn't even notice that if it happened in the middle of the night.
If we had 100% availability with an 18-day stretch without power that would be about 95% availability, but it would be hugely disruptive.
Suffice to say, less then 99% available is pretty terrible. You should come down and talk to a South African.
Expensive for now. I'd expect that to be a cheap battery bank in <10 years.
I live off-grid, with solar and LifePo4, but I'm not naive enough to think that would scale to an economy any time soon. And for the record, no below 99% availability should be seen as unacceptable.
Even if they have to run 10% of the time, we've still taken an enormous cut out of greenhouse gases. We would turn our attention to many other sources of greenhouse gas (agriculture, concrete, transportation, etc.)
(And yeah, batteries will probably never be enough for any place out of the tropics.)
Batteries have huge potential, simply due to the fact that they're so broadly defined - must store energy, output it as electricity on demand, and be cheap. There's a high chance that we find some way to make grid-scale batteries extremely cheaply, in the future.
In the mean time, getting to 90% will basically stop climate change in its tracks, giving us time to research dirt-cheap batteries.
Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that.
We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries and regions are getting close too.
It’s clear that we have all the technologies we need to do 100% renewables. There’s studies that indicate that the long term costs of this is lower than the traditional fossil and nuclear energy infrastructure. We just need to build the factories to continue scaling up. And of course the transition is more expensive than it’ll be when we just maintain and expand on the system.