Saying something is not true does not make it untrue.
Are you seriously claiming that solar/wind produce zero energy on 70% of days? I don’t know that I have ever heard a more moronic claim.
And as for solar and wind producing more at non-peak times – did you not read the part of my post about batteries and smart grids? Or not understand it? So it seems.
As for your mysterious 8% target, I do not have to go far to find an example – it is happening right here. We (North Carolina) get almost 9% of our power from solar and wind yet our power costs are well below the national average.
But this is all beside my original point that we do not need the oil that the Keystone pipeline would provide. There is no better proof of this than recent oil prices, which – just before the pandemic – were one-third of a few years ago. And this is despite the great decrease in Venezuelan production. Then there’s the fact that the tar sand oil production is a complete environmental disaster.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/
So bully for Biden, cancelling this idiotic pipeline.
Okay, so not 70% of the days, but 70+% of the time wind and solar farms are not producing any energy, period. Last I looked into this, the solar farms in AZ and NV had the best records for producing electricity but only did so 33% of the time. Also, the point when things go awry is between 8% to 10% capacity, although it could be as high as 12% depending on the other dynamics of the area.
Now, insofar as comparing prices, which you often reference or allude to, it is important to remember wind and solar energy prices have nothing to do with the cost of production, what most people think, nor do any other sources. The prices are just like the price of oil; the cost of production is irrelevant to the price that the market is willing to pay. The market is what dictates the price and is mainly dependent on
when that source of energy is put on the market, with "when" being very important.
Wind and solar produce most during non-peak hours, when demand and price are low, and little during peak hours, when demand and price are high. This means when determining the average price of this electricity, most of the data is coming from the cheaper times of day and is not weighted evenly throughout the day. However, the base load sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear) that produce energy on demand produce nearly the entire day, making the average price of electricity from these sources evenly weighted throughout the day. Because of this, you can not make a comparison of the price of wind/solar to anything else since it will be heavily distorted and give you a false sense that wind/solar is cheaper.
On top of that, a 2nd phenomenon of wind/solar makes the comparison even more distorted, that being you cant turn them off. If a wind/solar farm is producing energy, it will put it into the grid whether you want it or not, which could lead to an over supply if your capacity is large enough. If this happens, off-peak prices will crash causing the average price of wind/solar to drop even more. However, since wind/solar produce very little during peak hours, average prices of other sources will remain consistent, perhaps a slight drop, causing any comparison to be more unfair and misleading.
Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you are making enough money to cover your costs, but what tends to happen here is people fall into a trap. They falsely assume wind/solar is cheaper to produce based on the prices being charge, which have nothing to do with production, and start increasing their reliance on wind/solar. As they get into the 8% to 12% range of total energy coming from wind/solar, they will eventually start having supply shortages during peak hours since their required investment in base load sources gets, partially, diverted. This then causes the overall price of electricity to go up, but is only reflected in those sources producing at peak time. So the price of base load power goes up, while off-peak prices continue to crash, making wind/solar falsely look even more favorable. Due to this, if you do not recognize what is happening, people start to invest more in wind/solar, but since wind/solar is the source of the issue, they make the problem worse unknowingly.
This is where Germany and CA are currently at. 18.1% and ~25% of CA and Germany, respectively, lives in energy poverty. Their carbon footprint is just as abysmal too. It is all caused by too heavy a reliance on wind and solar.
Unfortunately I fear this is all coming soon to a place near you since Biden appears ready, willing, able and excited to jump in the same trap.
Insofar as batteries, did you miss my part about energy conversions loosing power? About 20% to 40% of power is lost when converting it into battery storage and then taking it out. This make batteries too inefficient to be worth wild, not to mention the amount of batteries you would need would be huge. I think CA has a total 6 minutes worth of battery power, and that includes every single battery in the state, all of them.
Although smart grids are important, typically what they best do is transfer power to other locales when there is an excess in one but a supply shortage in another. (It is bad to have the grid overcharged, so an excess of power needs to go somewhere.) This may seem beneficial for the excess energy produced by wind/solar at off-peak times, which is when they tend to produce power. The issue though is the price of electricity is already low and if you have too many wind/solar sources, the excess in electricity tends to crash prices at this time, which I mentioned before, to a point where the market price is often below the cost of production. So you loose money; this is a known problem for states/countries that have heavily invested in wind/solar already.
