Comment Re:Some can be done - and is. Most is bull. (Score 1) 442
A single home isn't a very good proxy for a regional or even national scale grid.
With your house example, the only options are solar and generator. In reality you would have more than these two options. For example, add wind to the mix. You can argue that it's not 100% but it will cover a lot of run time at night, saving you battery capacity and reducing the required over-sizing of your PV system. Perhaps instead of 400% oversizing on PV, you only need 200% PV+Wind oversize.
Now add in something else... biogas perhaps. That covers you a little bit more and you can again reduce your oversizing.
Now add geothermal, hydro, solar-thermal (which works at night), and you start to easily fill in the gaps.
The US had 1,153 billion watts of generating capacity as of 2011 (Nameplate ratings, spreadsheet) and used ~3,797 billion kilowatthours that year. Naively we can say that if all our powerplants ran at 100% nameplate capacity, we could generate an entire year's worth of electrical energy in just about 3300 hours, or about 4 months... giving us a roughly 300% oversize on our electrical generating capacity *now*.
The key, of course, is that none of those plants are operating 24/7/365, and rarely are any of them operating at peak capacity.
=Smidge=