The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight.
When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks.
How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible?
Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible.
People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.
You don't need to survive for a week but max. a day or so. Anything longer and electricity will come from somewhere else in the grid, either a different region or a back-up conventional plant being gas or nuclear or even coal.
At least in Germany even large industrial energy consumers are for years now an active part of grid balancing. Either they can stop and resume production as needed or continuous processes serve a similar function as your base power plants. The silver bullet to get them there was money, it became financially viable and profitable and all of a sudden businesses jumped at the opportunity.
Disclaimer: Worked at two of these power hungry places and know of of another one making quite some money on the electricity exchanges by just timing his production runs properly.
Solar still works in cloudy weather, and you can compensate by building more than you typically need. You can transmit increasingly long distances. Here's a line working at 2300+km.
Most weather doesn't span 2300km in all directions so I think it's possible to handle most situations and fill in the gaps over time.
You can use a Tesla as home battery. Charge at work or home, or at a supercharger, power your house at night.
Sure there are edge cases like far north where you need coal or nuclear. But I'd bet the bulk of humankind can be supplied well given another 10/20 years of innovation.
The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight.
When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks.
How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible?
Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible.
People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.