We have enough natural gas to run the entire grid during a windless and cloudy day. Our demand on those days is usually fairly low. The extra deman for brownouts was due to us having brief periods of 50GW of demand during an extreme heatwave.

The periods of extreme demand do not occur during cloudless days, the demand is brought on by AC. I have never seen on the CAISO where the daytime solar demand is under 20%, statewide storms like that are extremely rare.

My point is that if we are 90% renewables and 10% natural gas, that is a huge improvement. Then perhaps it can be 91% and 9% natural gas.

Because 6 months out of the year is extremely predictable weather regarding sunshine, we can probably get by with 300GWH of battery, 70GW of solar, and 25GW of wind. May 1st, October 31st could likely be 95% renewable.

Tony Seba of Rethink X made a presentation where they actually went and tracked historical weather data, then designed a system that would have 100% uptime. They then took the cost projected prices for renewables and gave capacity numbers for solar, wind and battery storage for California, Texas, and New England.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zgwiQ6BoLA

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The main idea is that solar will be so cheap that it will be viable to just overbuild by some huge factor so that on cloudy days where output is diminished by 80%, the remaining 20% is still collecting and that 20% is enough to satisfy demand, taking the edge off the batteries.

In one example he proposed 330GW of solar for California. Our normal demand is 20-35GW (with peak summer at 50GW). But it would be 30GW powering the grid and 300GW charging batteries. So every 1 hour of sunshine covers 8-10 hours of battery storage.