Wind or Solar is not the answer.
Wind does sometimes blow at night (though less than during the day and usually not enough for a turbine to generate power, because there’s no surface heating), and batteries/stored hydro exist.
But there is no pathway to grid-level storage of solar and wind energy on a scale that’ll keep us powered through the night, even if we were totally indifferent to the economic and ecological impact of replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar.
And what’s worse, innovation in technology can’t make wind and solar work, ever.
There just isn’t enough energy in the wind, even if we were harvesting it at the Betz Limit (and we are in fact pretty close).
And while there is a whole bunch of energy in the sun, there isn’t enough hitting the places that need to be powered when they need to be powered, even before accounting for growth.
Fusion could work, eventually. The sun is a fusion plant 92 million miles away, throwing energy in all directions, sufficient to power the natural world. It stands to reason it’s not a particularly efficient way to power much else.
The options are:
- Nuclear
- Climate change
- Degrowth and population collapse
Wind and solar only contribute to 2 and 3.