> Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh.
[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/04/solar-wind-72-of-south-...
Different areas will require different trade-offs. Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter.
Currently storage does not make sense because the cheapest store of energy is a smart consumer. It will be very interesting to see if actual storage outside of governmental emergency backups will ever be needed in wind heavy deployments.
What incentive exists to decarbonize the remaining 26%, and provide clean power on bad-weather days?
Renewables will go further with some combination of short and long term storage, dispatchable demand of other kinds, and outright curtailment.
