"Why does lowering the EAF so little ease the pressure on storage so much? The explanation is in those rare meteorological events of extended low wind and sun. They don’t happen often over a 20-year span, but building enough storage to deal with them when they do happen makes the last few percent of EAF exponentially more expensive."

"...let's just start with the first 80% to 90% to 95% as fast as we can."

That's funny, Matt. Sounds like it might have been recorded on a cassette tape recovered from a time vault of the 1970s (at the time, engineers blamed such predictions on readily-available hallucinogens).

"95%, 90%, 80%...": never. To provide minimal power to everyone in the world with a renewables penetration of 20%, it will already be too late, and the reason is simple: letting the lights go out, to residences, to business, to emergency services, to retirement homes, to hospitals, to airports, is not an option. Thus - there can never be enough storage.

"But...but...if prices come down, we could get to 95%, then power the the remaining 5% with natural gas!"

What power plant with a 5% capacity factor is profitable? We would have to find a way to maintain an entire gas infrastructure just to cover for extended periods of cloudy weather.

Batteries would need to drop in price by at least three orders of magnitude. They would need to be replaced every ~12 years.

Even if solar panels were free, they, too, would need to be replaced ever ~25 years.

Well-intentioned energy activists have not thought this through, and (not coincidentally) they're typically affluent. The less-affluent 99% of the world will continue to burn diesel fuel, gas, and coal, and guarantee our collective doom.