Comments by "Bob thebomb" (@bobthebomb1596) on "Government’s net zero policy will be a ‘political trainwreck’" video.

Those figures are for the construction of the solar and wind farms but remember, there is very little installed storage at present. Renewables only work if they are used in conjunction with either storage or an alternative energy source for base load. Remember also that going down the storage route requires the installation and operation of excess capacity.
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@SlowhandGreg There are plenty of theoretical solutions and a few practical ones. So why, when renewables are so "cheap", has no one invested in them? Don't forget also that storage is useless until generation capacity exceeds demand. And I mean physically exceeds, not theoretical capacity. If generation is 31GW and demand is 30GW, that's 30 hours to store one hours worth of demand. That's why cost per GWh is not the only relevant factor.
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@SlowhandGreg That might be the case in Australia, but here in the UK we have those offshore wind farms. When operating fully the UK has sufficient wind capacity to meet 70-80% of average demand, yet there is no storage in place nor any plans to build any. Wind thus supplies around 20% of our grid power on average. If storage is as cheap and reliable as proponents claim, why no investment? The simple fact is that without base-load, the capital investment required is huge.
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@SlowhandGreg A 2GWh storage facility, sufficient to power our grid for around 5 minutes. Or we could have replaced our nuclear reactors with new ones, which would have covered 45% of demand. Add in Hydro, biomass etc and we would have around 54% of demand covered, leaving just 46% for storage backed solar/wind. The latter already average 28% without storage, so the UK would already be just 18% or around 5GW short of fossil free. As it is, fossils comprise 43% of our power generation (12.8GW) despite us having over 30GW of installed wind/solar.
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