Enough batteries to last with no nuclear, coal, or natural gas on a still winter night? There are not enough grid scale batteries yet. There’s ~8 hours of daylight at the 45th parallel in December.
I don’t feel like doing napkin math on Saturday morning, but you’d need an obscene amount of batteries, the US uses 500+ GWh per day.
Ideally battery storage density will keep advancing to the point where we can use grid scale backup batteries for long durations but we are not there yet.
A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
OK, so the answer to my question is “No”.
You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities. What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans? That doesn’t even get into industrial electrical loads..
Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries, sorry. Neither is “Let’s use cars to back up houses,” which ignores the fact that most power demand is non-residential.
We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
> OK, so the answer to my question is “No”.
So what? Something which hasn't been done yet must not be attempted? Or is it doomed to fail?
The transition of many electrical systems is a work-in-progress. A complete re-haul of such heavy industry branch cannot be quickly completed, especially during a global crisis.
> You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities.
Nope.
USA: Residential customers (139.894 million) directly consumed 1,509.23 TWh, or 35.23% of the total.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
> What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans?
A continental mix of renewables can cope most of the time. The point is the 'backup' (when a geographical zone doesn't produce enough and cannot be helped by another zone): dams, batteries, green hydrogen...
> Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries
This is a work-in-progress. 15 years ago some said that renewables will never be able to generate more than a few percent of the current running on national grid.
> We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
To each is own opinion.
Production trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...