A few points:
1. Wind stops blowing and sun doesn’t shine every single night. So you need the SAME CAPACITY conventional power plant backing the up! In other words you need to build TWICE the capacity as if you’d built a gas-fired or coal-fired plant alone. You simply cannot “dispatch” the power from wind and solar, so it takes TWICE the amount of capital and TWICE the number of plant operators. This doesn’t change even if you have large-scale energy storage systems - you need to first build the generation capacity and also build the storage capacity. You are still building TWICE the capacity you had to build if you used gas or coal alone.
2. Solar and Wind are highly distributed, low energy density generation technologies. They require MILES of transmission conductors not needed with central stations to collect the power from all over and deliver it to a major transmission line.
3. The amount of materials required to build wind turbines is vastly larger than the amount of materials needed to build conventional gas or coal fired power plants.
4. Wind turbines have switched to generators that use permanent magnets thus eliminating the need for gearboxes. But this means they consume HUGE amounts of very expensive rare earth elements which are used in small quantities in coal and gas fired power plants. High temperature turbines and boilers use large amounts of chromium, but it is not as scarce as the rare earths in high power magnets.
5. Wind and Solar are inherently very low-density energy sources unlike fossil fuels. It will take far more resources to deliver the same amount of energy from low-density sources than it does from high-energy-density sources like gas, oil and coal.
Wind and Solar will simply never be as economical as gas, oil and coal. Period. To think otherwise means you are smoking crack.
I pay Ten Cents per Kilowatt hour. Let me know when Wind/Solar gets down to eight cents per kw/hr.
not to mention, the optimum life of a solar panel is around 10 years in high UV areas (like SoCal). Expansion and contraction causes them to eventually leak, and leaking means corrosion. And, the hotter it gets over 95, which is practically every day in SoCal for 2 seasons, the less the energy conversion at the panel (they don’t like hot, either), with an efficiency of about 35%-new, and dropping with time in service. So most panels will be pushing it to last as long as the 20-year financing does.