Why Do Experts Favor Solar and Wind as Renewable Energies Despite their Intermittency?
Steven P. Reinhardt
TL;DR
The note analyzes why solar and wind are favored for future energy despite intermittency, arguing that their global resource abundance and lower forecasted costs drive market confidence in overcoming intermittency through storage and hybrid systems. It introduces seven evaluation dimensions and uses radar plots and cost forecasts to compare technologies across 2024 and 2034, highlighting solar and wind as cost leaders with scalable deployment. The discussion emphasizes that, while constant renewable options add value for the remaining load, significant advances in long-duration storage and ongoing discovery (e.g., geologic hydrogen) are essential for grid-scale adoption. The work provides a framework for understanding technology trade-offs and offers practical implications for policy, investment, and microgrid design where intermittency is a manageable constraint. It also underscores the pivotal role of cost trajectories in shaping the energy transition over the next decade and beyond.
Abstract
As humanity accelerates its shift to renewable energy generation, people who are not experts in renewable energy are learning about energy technologies and the energy market, which are complex. The answers to some questions will be obvious to expert practitioners but not to non-experts. One such question is Why solar and wind generation are expected to supply the bulk of future energy when they are intermittent. We learn here that once the baseline hurdles of scalability to utility scale and the underlying resources being widely available globally are satisfied, the forecasted cost of solar and wind is 2-4X lower than competing technologies, even those that are not as scalable and available. The market views intermittency as surmountable.