"solar facilities in Mississippi only generated about 22 percent of their potential output in 2021, which means utility companies would need to install 450 megawatts (MW) of solar to generate 100 MW of electricity, on average, over the course of a year, requiring a huge overbuild of capacity to get the same annual energy output."This is naive. You cannot just quadruple your solar plant size because you still generate ZERO power at night. You need either a 1) electricity storage system or 2) a backup fossil or nuclear plant the same size as your solar plant.
Either way, you have to buy TWO power plants whereas before you only had to purchase ONE power plant. So you have doubled your capital costs AND doubled your fixed maintenance cost (costs that you incur if you run the plan or not). Large-scale storage does not exist yet except as pumped hydro. Batteries will never be a storage system for solar plants because of their staggeringly high price.
So the situation is far worse than author Orr says.
The other fallacy in green energy is that end-of-life costs are conveniently ignored and not accounted for. The cost of demolishing a fossil-fuel fired power plant is low. The cost of demolishing a nuclear plant is high and spent-fuel storage is a difficult problem. But the green zealots just totally ignore the demolition costs of solar and wind plants.
Just before sunset, shut off the power.
Turn it on after sunrise on sunny days.
Everybody does without electricity when it's night or cloudy. /S