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A renewables only grid is obviously possible, it just involves using a lot of batteries to create synthetic inertia and last through the night, which is just power engineering. It’s not some magic future technology, it’s just a question of execution. There are tons of privately funded solar projects just waiting for utility hookup. Also, there are renewables without the base load problem. Hydro is the biggest one in use right now, but next gen geothermal seems pretty promising (thanks Texas!), and as you pointed out nuclear is great though technically not renewable.
I do agree that Germany did some very silly stuff, and you shouldn't prematurely kill fossil fuels, but we are getting to a point where solar can compete on its own merits and at that point we should let it win.
Is synthetic inertia good enough? What if the power frequency disruption happens faster than it can be synthetically substituted for? A big spinning turbine doesn't need to be told when to pick up the slack, physical inertia has no lag time. Maybe that's what went wrong in Spain during the blackouts there. Thousands of inverters following the same algorithm reducing power output during a voltage slip, causing frequency to get worse.
What actually is reactive power and vars, do we know? I don't. Even amongst experts it seems to be contested. Is it real or is it mathematical abstractions?
Putting all that to one side, can solar actually compete on its own merits in a serious electrical grid? The capacity factor remains low, if you stick them all out in Arizona or the desert somewhere you'll need lots of grid infrastructure to take it where it needs to go, and a heap of batteries. The whole-system constraints are severe, as you mention regarding issues with hookups. I find it instructive that in the datacentre buildout, Musk builds a bunch of gas turbines to power his data centres, despite having considerable solar + battery capability in the Musk zaibatsu. Gas gets you where you want to go! Solar is not so well suited for industrial demands even with batteries. We'd need a whole heap of batteries to manage solarizing the grid and electrifying transport simultaneously, while there's also a datacentre boom.
I think gas should be prioritized more since it fits in the existing system and meets current needs better.
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I thought that was pretty simple for college-level science.
When you have a resistive load on AC power, you can predict the instantaneous current by the instantaneous voltage, as they are directly proportional. When you have an inductive or capacitive load on AC power, you can't. The instantaneous current doesn't only depend on the voltage, it also depends on how "full" the capacitor or inductor is. As a result, voltage and current don't line up with each other. Due to how things work, this makes the current be sine wave that's offset forwards or backwards by a bit from the voltage.
Calculating power is as simple as multiplying the current and the voltage. It's utterly trivial in a steady-state DC system, and simple integral in an AC resistive system. When there's a reactive load, you have to remember that sometimes the voltage is positive but the current is negative, and a positive times a negative gives you a negative value for the load's power consumption. They are literally recharging the grid for a fraction of each cycle, which means they aren't making use of the power.
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