> That's not true and unfair.

I believe you are genuine, but also the information you present is miles from the reality in Germany and Europe, and the state of research in the field in general.

> Believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. I want somebody to walk me through what a end-goal for our ideal energy mix is, preferably without casually throwing it that we just need to create a new exotic battery technology.

Until 80% the carbon optimal mix is Gas + Renewables. For the last 20% you need to start producing the Gas from excess energy during times when renewables outstrip demand.

Also, gas is incredibly much better for carbon footprint than coal, so in the short term replacing coal with gas makes a lot of sense.

And again, there are no unproven technologies in this scenario. Everything exists and exists today. It just makes no sense to start generating gas from renewables until you have many periods where renewables outstrip demand.

Finally, again, for economic reasons it starts making sense to do the same (turn excess production into gas) for nuclear as well [2]. It also is obvious that Germany fucked up with getting out of nuclear when they did.

The intermittency issues you claim also don't really exist as such in todays grid. What's your source for that? In Germany the amount of balancing energy used to combat intermittency has been _declining_ for years [1]. They have congestion issues, but that is again a political rather than a technical issue (if you can't get people to accept power lines in their backyards, good luck with building nuclear power plants).

European grid stability has generally been improving with the build out of renewables (and blackouts are ten times more common in the US than in Germany). This is often said to be related to the improved coordination in the European system.

A number of authors have mapped out different aspects of the transition towards 100% systems [3]. But again, we already have 100% systems on islands today. So your claim that no one knows how to build them is manifestly wrong. There are plenty of problems with transitioning or scaling, but there is no fundamental mystery about any of this.

For the 100% scenario the work of Greiner for example explicitly is built around tackling the question of transmission vs storage, taking all sorts of variability into account [4]. You can always quibble with the assumptions, with the level of modeling, etc. But none of this is entirely new. We have had reports maping out the 100% scenarios for years, with a number of different options. (Last relatively excentric one I saw advocated building electrolysis platforms powerd by windfarms offshore and directly transporting gas into the gas system, I would class that as a technological challenge, even if there isn't anything fundamentally unproven about the technology).

And again, look at what happened with solar. Our knowledge of running and building these systems will increase dramatically as we build them. There is no indication to me that we are not capable of doing so _if there was sufficient political will_. And that last part is what's truly hard.

Of course then we still have to face the hard problems: Industry and agriculture....

[1] https://www.next-kraftwerke.de/wp-content/uploads/ausschreib...

[2] https://nworbmot.org/blog/burden-of-proof.html

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...

[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf