Renewable tidbits
 

*As of April,2019,Iowa was getting 37% of it's electric power from wind.
*As of same date,Oklahoma was getting 31.9%
*South Dakota,over 25%
*Kansas,10.6%
*As of 2017,Texas was getting 18% of it's power from wind/solar.
*As of 2014,US installed wind capacity was 14.67% of total demand.
*As of same time,wind constituted 4.4% of total US electrical demand.
*In 2015,US onshore wind was the cheapest form of electric power.

Where did those cone from?

where
 

Most is from the USDOE Renewable Energy Laboratory website.The wind power $ value (1.5-cents/kWh) is from Ph.D.Michael Wysession's lecture series on The Science of Energy,2015,The Great Courses.
The 2017 Texas data is from my CoServ Electric Co-op Magazine,May 2019 issue.

Well then forget solar.
Except when. You need extra reliable mid day power.
Or for home owners.

solar
 

There are some concentrated solar power plants which can store enough heat in molten salts to provide load through the night.
And a market basket of other storage technologies already in service,or in the pipeline.

The concentrated solar plants are a huge waste of money and they use natural gas.

waste of money
 

Renewable energy storage is a topic of much interest.
Having a thermal phase-change 'battery',for night time power production would be a contribution to that challenge,wouldn't it? Do you object to solar energy with a 100% capacity factor?
And if externalities and hidden costs are properly accounted for in present- day fossil-fuel-fired power-plant electric rates,do the economics of solar not take on a more favorable position?
We're talking about decarbonization after all.

A thermal solar plant that burns natural gas isn't very carbon free.

Even if it ran 24 hours it still would be way below 100% capacity factor. The solar collector would have to be about 500% over sized or more, with a huge storage tank just to make name plate around the clock and would probably still need to burn some natural gas.
Probably be better off with wind power.

natural gas
 

I was limiting my comment to concentrated solar.The fracking/methane issue makes natural gas less appealing more and more.If the plant provides power 24-hours a day,at the plants rated capacity,on the days it can produce,that would be 100% capacity factor for those days.In the Atacama desert that might be 365-days/year.It's all about the design criteria,yes.
As part of a market basket of solutions it could play an important role.

Fracking for natural gas has allowed it to become a cheap replacement for coal.
Don't like fracking then you must like coal.

More favorable; certainly.

Relative cost/benefit to fossil fuels now, in the nearterm, and far future... things begin to get a lot more hazy.

We've clearly benefited mightily by use of fossil fuels. I've not seen a comprehensive study showing net benefit and net cost for various levels of fossil fuel use, and I don't expect to ever see one because the variables involved are so complex, and weighing the benefits and consequences involves much subjectivity.

I'm not saying we need give no consideration to fossil fuel consumption, only saying that even those most in the know are far from having an "all things considered" understanding.

As I've maintained, the best course of action probably lies somewhere between AOC live in caves proposals, and the climate denying contingent (do they have a figurehead?) do-nothing crowd.

The "do nothing crowd" is only like 68% of voters.
If you count people unwilling to pay more than $10 per month to fix climate change as the do nothing crowd.

I like when ever the hard core believers can't produce a logical answer they always turn to ambiguous, immeasurable "externalities" as the catch all.

Fallacy of the Excluded Middle.

The trick is to get people to do the right things for the wrong reason.

Mushroom-shaped pod houses have great acoustics. My parents house at the coast (1980) had a solar water heater with a grid-tied backup to the solar tank, and point-of-use flash heater (Instahot) at the kitchen sink. They liked hot water.

Like me I'm going solar for all the wrong reasons.
Definitely doing more than virtually all of the people willing to pay more than $10 per month.

In the USA, wind has actually surpassed wood in total primary energy production.
.
.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/...urce_large.jpg
.
.
.

Answers With Joe on renewable energy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_XQyApXXL4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iegje9gW4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhr9wNOcdI

Ongoing renewable energy development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSDo67E1k3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNFz5DjsRB8

Still relevant of course. He does include Moon Power, but puts the contribution in perspective. There an interesting open-ended barrage but I think the solution is a closed oscillating water column that stores energy as compressed air. And all the equipment is above water level.

Oops, two more to watch.

...Feb and Mar 2018, comments are disabled for both. ???

fossil fuels
 

In 2015,a Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment study found that,for the coal industry alone,their hidden societal costs amounted to $345-billion a year (about half the Pentagon's budget),requiring a tripling of coal-fired electrical rates to compensate for.
Not only for Americans,this sort of thing makes US coal a global pariah.

externalities
 

The International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA) is one organization who's attempting to connect the dots.

I've always liked coal miner songs, from Loretta Lynn to Ganstagrass.

youtube.com:search_query=the+mountain+steve+earle