>>11144122That link has no new information. The fact that wind and solar can provide baseload is not up for debate; it absolutely can. The question is of cost. The point that the capacity factor can be only kind of pathetic instead of completely pathetic if you average the production over a huge area was always known, but never helpful. You still need to overbuilt capacity by a factor of 2-4 just to meet what you want to get, and by the way you'll still have days with little or no wind. Nice of the article to skim over that fact by claiming that gas can take the slack. You'll essentially need to keep enough gas to meet the entire demand of your desired wind capacity to do this, and standby gas plants are very expensive because you always need to keep them warm, since cold start is several hours to days. How much is this costing? How much carbon is your "wind" producing now? I personally totally discard the option of keeping gas around for this, which means you need battery, which is expensive like you can't believe.
There's a reason why off-shore is still built even though it's 3x the cost of land turbines. Getting a 70% capacity factor from wind on land is actually more expensive, and still, 70% capacity factor is merely kind of tolerable when the source isn't the majority of your grid.
