Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.

That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.

And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.

Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.

For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.

Interesting side effect is that this reliance on cables introduces a dependency on copper which already is in short supply and which can be mined only in specific regions.

So it re-introduces some geo-political dependencies. Not in the way fossil fuels or unranium do, because a copper cable won't "burn up" to produce the energy, but they do need some upkeep.

Another dependency this introduces is the network itself. A failure in specific regions could lead to massive blackouts (Like recently in spain/portugal) or could even become political pressure instruments like currently the russian-natural-gas-pipelines in Europe are

The Spain/Portugal blackout happened when network management failed to predict a workable source mix. Basically human error.

Political pressure is hardly a renewables problem, and is more likely to mitigate it than make it worse.

Currently we get a lot of energy by shipping it as physical cargo around the world through various unstable regions after it's produced by hostile regimes - which is not exactly a recipe for reliability.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/investigation-into-s...