Paper ID: 2408.08910

Why Do Experts Favor Solar and Wind as Renewable Energies Despite their Intermittency?

Steven P. Reinhardt

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.

Submitted: Aug 13, 2024