You don’t need 1twh of batteries to support 1gw of solar you need 2-4gwh depending on wanting 2 or 4 hours of overnight storage
At the present state of things, you're definitely right.
I'm talking about winter, where you can count on solar panels producing... nearly nothing.
This is a company here in Estonia sharing customers' monthly production numbers. This is a company trying to sell you solar installations, so they have no reason to show any numbers as lower than reality. I clicked through several customer experience pages, and most have ~30x less energy generated in December vs May.
The Nebraska comparison in your other reply to me doesn't work out because Nebraska is way further south. In December, the sun doesn't "rise" here as much as it "drags its' rotting carcass across the horizon". Okay, we're not as far north as something like Svalbard, but the angle of the sun during solar noon on December 21 (shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere) is around 7 degrees. In Nebraska it stays around 25 degrees. While we technically get up to 6 hours of daytime even in December, it's usually overcast so average sunshine per day is about 30 minutes over the winter. And if it's not overcast, you can expect it to get cold fast, driving up usage.
So to go full solar (which I'm discussing as a thought experiment, I don't actually know anyone who wants to go FULL solar), essentially all the energy needs to be generated in about 7-8 months each year, because once the days start getting shorter, they go short REALLY fast. That's going to be a lot of H2 to store.
or just don’t nuke your legacy power from orbit, and keep them as backup/battery equivalent.
That's a reasonable suggestion, it's just that we're not burning anything clean like coal here, we're burning shale. It's comparable to lignite (if not worse) in CO2, but way more ash. Yes, shale the actual rock, not shale gas.
It's super frustrating.