> what exactly would i be wrong about?
Everything. Literally everything.
> wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have
Almost all heat on Earth is solar in origin, including the majority that we don’t use.
> can't scale
Scales up to Kardashev III.
> requires insane amounts of land
Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people.
15TW all-source power use * 1kW/m^2 * 20% cell efficiency * 25% capacity factor = 300,000 square km = 1.7 years of lost rainforest = 38.9 m^2/person = a little more than half my apartment as land area per person.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15TW%20%2F%28%201kw%2Fm...
Again, that 38.9 m^2/person is for all power — heating and transport, domestic and industrial usage — if you only wanted to deal with electricity you can achieve that just by covering rooftops, while you can cover about 90% of car needs with PV on BEV cars (if you allow them to share, but that’s not difficult, heavy users need to charge just like they already do and light users would want to sell the excess, dismissing this as “complex” would be ridiculous given what cars are), meaning not much extra new land has to be dedicated to PV (or to wind if you want diversity).
The only big things people even need to think about now is stuff like synthetic jet fuel, and even then we already know the chemical reactions, it’s just about commercialising them.
> requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work
No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false.
And further, they’re still incredibly valuable even without batteries.
And they are the only existing long-term solution to our energy needs, given fossil fuels are finite and commercial fusion isn’t actually a thing yet.
> isn't reliable
Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail, and seasonally in broad brushstrokes. We’re not going to be surprised that winter is dark, we can plan around this trivially in much the same way and for much the same reasons that supermarkets don’t get surprised by seasonal demand for ice-cream or raincoats.
> requires absurd amounts of resources
Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people.
> needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload
Or, as demonstrated, batteries.
You could also do it with a sufficiently large grid, because transmission losses between e.g. Berlin and the Sahara desert are less than the price difference between PV and coal or nuclear.
> and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density
Literally Dyson swarms.
> A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress.
“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel.
Plus I can literally buy USB batteries with PV pre-mounted to them at negligible cost compared to those without PV — the hard stuff has already been done, commercialised, commoditised, and made it to the high street.
> Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
PV and wind are the cheapest power sources, so the most capable of improving that.