> At a mix appropriate for the region

We don't need to think regionally. We can move power thousands of miles. Yes, of course, it's easier over the ocean, however, we have the means to do so over land as well. For reference, a project from UK is moving power from approximately 4000 km away (Morocco).

In other words, if wind --as I believe is the case-- has significant advantages over solar, we can locate wind wherever it makes sense and then move the power as far and wide as needed. We could spider out to various storage facilities and distribute to towns and cities.

The point is, power is easy to move. We already do it.

> Now compare wind and solar and existing hydro and 2-5% w2e to just wind instead of just wind vs. just solar

I don't understand why you are asking for this comparison. My point is that grid-scale solar is a bad idea, by itself or mixed with something else, including wind. I gave most of the reasons in support of this conclusion in the comment you responded to.

With solar we are starting with a technology that does not produce any power half the time, every day, forever. Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) figure 12 shows a close-up chart of a few days in July in the US. I reproduce it here for convenience:

https://i.imgur.com/HTxWL6o.png

The variability of solar over time is massive. Not so for wind. particularly if located optimally and geographically distributed.

In the US you cannot do any better with solar than that picture. Clouds, rain, snow and dirt will turn this:

https://i.imgur.com/aNnbmDp.png

Into this nightmare:

https://i.imgur.com/breTHQd.png

And so, reliability, capacity factor, availability, or whatever measure or term one might care to use for solar is always significantly inferior to that of wind. There's data on this.

My question is rooted in optimization at many levels (list is not exaustive):

- Energy production per installed GW
- Land utilization
- Ecological impact
- Operation and maintenance costs
- Storage requirements
- Strategic supply chain factors
- Scale of future waste/recycling problem

Looking back at MPP3, table 6, we can ask a fundamental question:

How much installed grid-sale capacity do we have to build?

No new nuclear or hydro. The table, is reduced to onshore and offshore wind and solar. The total for those technologies is 5,087 GW. That's what we have to build. That's the challenge.

My question is simple:

We have to build 5,087 GW generation capacity.
Given the optimization criteria list presented above.
What combination of solar and wind would be optimal?

Looking at the numbers, I cannot find justification for building almost any grid-scale solar.

Let me give you a simple example of this...

Solar requires at least four times more storage than wind to reach the same or similar reliability.

I'll assume batteries.

Well, that means at least four times more mining, processing, factories, CO2 emissions, damage to the ecosystem, transportation, installation and maintenance costs, mean time between failure, waste, recycling costs and effects, etc.

And that's just one of my comparison vectors. Isn't that enough to at least question the decision?

No?

OK. The land-use ratio isn't something that can be ignored. The same 5,087 GW capacity would use about 2.5% of California if it was wind. Solar would require 30% of the State. Just think about what that implies in terms of every single factor that goes into building and maintaining such systems.

This is why I argue grid-scale solar isn't making sense to me. Why use 12 times the land and over four times the batteries when you don't have to?