Little thought experiment:
- Offshore wind costs about 3 Million USD/MW to install
- Germany currently has 218,000 MW installed capacity, about 130,000 MW of this is already renewable energy, but let's ignore that for the moment
- So to add 218,000 MW installed renewable energy capacity you'll need 654 Billion USD
- Germany currently has an annual federal budget of 476 Billion USD
So to add 100% to the currently installed electricity generation capacity in Germany, the German government would have to spend less than 5% of its current annual budget each year for 30 years. Let's say 6%, if you add some money to switch out network components to deal with greater variability in network loads.
That seems very achievable, especially because of course most of this money will come from private investments, not the state. If required, industrialized economies could of course spend the required sums to build out their installed capacities by a factor of 2,3 or 5. That would reduce the need for base load capable producers drastically, as well as the need for grid-scale storage.
Or you could just write that for exorbitant sum of money you get meaningless amount of storage. Additionally you need cash out that sum periodically because batteries has limited amount of cycles.
