Solar and wind are good complements. Solar is strong at day in the summer, and wind is strong at night in the winter. Most Northern european countries would need 2-10 days of storage with 2-5x required capacity of solar+wind installed. Noone wants to store a full season’s energy.

Tony Seba talks a lot about this stuff if you’re interested.

> Noone wants to store a full season’s energy.

Dams do that...

I of course meant in the context of solar/wind plus batteries :)

So to rephrase the part you quote for clarity: No one is aiming to store a full season’s energy in batteries

Less will do :)

They really don't. Dams aren't infinite and rely on water flow. They can buffer some percentage, but cannot bulge and store 2x.

> They really don't.

You don't live in a place that relies on dams, do you?

80% of NZ's power comes from dams, I've worked on few energy projects, built my solar system and chat with friends who actually build this. I was very passionate about this too - how come dams can't support storage. Why are you building battery storage for $500 / kWh (no joke) when FIR and SIR is like $0.32/MWh. Turns out NZ gov doesn't even allow dam owners to stop generation.

So you're saying that dams can technically support storage? Not sure I understand.

About six weeks worth in NZ. Not quite enough since solar production goes down about 4x in winter. Lots of wind farms will be needed and we are not quite ready for them.

I have no idea why they contest such obvious things. One just has to look at the energy supply mix of Germany in winter, and the truth appears. They have massively overbuilt wind capacity and it's still not even close. They currently have 64 GW of installed capacity but yet in winter, in the good months, it's only 35% of their electricity supply at most. And they don't even use electric heating for residential building (unlike France) and their industries are still heavily reliant on gas/coal powered plants.

In January 2025, they had: 33.13% from wind, 22.23% from coal, 17.55% from gas, 7.65% from biomass, 3.56% from solar. So, you have about 40% of the electricity coming from fossil fuel and that's before talking about heating needs.

By those numbers they would need about 110 GW of installed capacity (which seems to be the plan) but they have only been able to install 5-6 GW in the best years, many years only building 2-3 GW of capacity.

So, in the best-case scenario they will be able to cover their current needs in 10 years, more realistically 15-20 years. And then maybe they can think about stuff like heating and AC. By the time they will have capacity it will be time to replace their earlier turbines, considering the lifespan of 30 years.

And that is if they can keep raising the price of electricity because right about now, I wouldn't like to be paying German price for electricity, the raise in France (in part because of German politics) was painful enough. In comparison, France could "fail" at building a few EPRs and still be better off overall.

I think renewable a definitely a great complementary source of energy for times where it is abundant and cheap to capture but it doesn't make a lot of sense to bet everything on it. There are just too many constraints even if we forget about the price.

Generating enough power even in winter is feasible in most countries. The very northerly ones may need other solutions (but luckily tend to be sparsely populated and thus need less power).