I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun.
And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.
And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.
It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.
> I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
There is a paper floating around showing that for both US+Canada and the continental EU there has never been a single hour where there has been no wind and no sun somewhere in a 30 year period.
Here's the CAISO wind graph. This is the total wind energy from four large states. Note that the low point is 1/7 that of the peak, which is around noon.[1] Here's the PJM wind graph.[2] Low point is about 1/4 the peak, again, around local noon.
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
Every night there is no sun, and there are many times where there is not enough wind for all of our needs.
...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.
And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.
And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.
It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.