#electrical storage

This is an assumption a lot of people make. I made this assumption when I was younger. The difference between me and most people is that I accept evidence to the contrary. There is no place in the world where solar or wind power are grid competitive. Except maybe Denmark. This is because Denmark has an extremely low population, and (relatively) narrow straits that have consistent, offshore wind.

it is utterly amazing how people can ignore both the extremely obvious problems with solar and wind, and ignore the decades of experimentation.

Because we have been pushing for it my entire life.

Hypothetically, solar and wind require no material inputs, and as such, can hypothetically achieve better cost / KWh.

But this ignores all of the glaring problems with it, and the fact it effectively lies to the public. This is because solar and wind have a hypothetical maximum power generation. If a nuclear power plants says it's going to produce 600MWe (Megawatt electrical), since we can control the inputs, it's going to produce 600MWe, year round.

If a wind mill says it has a capacity of 20MWe, then it has 20MWe during ideal conditions. Solar array might only break 80% of it's capacity during a few hours for a few days out of the year. They are instead given a Capacity Factor, which typically ranges from 15% to 35%, over the course of a year.

This isn't to say solar and wind are useless, but they have problems.

Solar varies considerably, not just during the day, but over the course of the year, with the actual daily production dropping to maybe 20% in the winter.

Wind obviously only works when the wind is blowing.

As such, both need extensive power storage. We have a number of good ideas, but the only one actually used in any realistic amounts is hydro power storage.

I.e. you have a hydro power plant, and pump some of the water back up when power is available from your periodic sources. When the sun is shinning or the wind is blowing.

In order for this to work, you need the geographical basis for hydro power, which is one of the best power sources in the world. Where I live, we have a LOT of hydro power, but we also have costal mountains, which could produce massive amounts of wind power for extremely low costs. Naturally, we aren't doing it.

But, there is another, less obvious problem with solar and wind. The power they produce over their lifetime is only a few orders higher than the energy needed to produce them. This means that, at some point, we will likely have reached the point where it is self-sustaining, but we are not anywhere near that yet. We need baseload generation, and that is either hydro, geothermal, fossil fuels, or nuclear. Or, say, BEETD.

What can we do?

California has mandatory grid buybacks, i.e. if your house produce more power than it uses, the grid has to buy it back. Houses that have their own solar power have their own power walls, and very logically, only give back to the grid once the power wall is charged. This means that California gets a lot of grid buyback electrical power between 13:00-16:00, and little to none during the rest of the time.

So, the obvious answer is - hydroelectricity. California needs dams anyways to control water flow, to keep it consistent.

Seriously, for solar power, what California needs is storage. And California could theoretically reach a point where power generation is entirely local, or almost entirely local, with local grid balancing stations instead of local substations.

We don't have enough lithium and cobalt in the world to use for batteries, but we have iron-air batteries, salt water batteries, compressed air storage, flywheel storage, supercapacitors. Nevermind liquid salt solar thermal powerplants, that continue to produce power at night.

and *cough* LFTR *cough*