> Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.
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> Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.
This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.
It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.
"Base load" refers to electricity demand, not sources of electricity. Things that consume electricity are a "load". The "base load" is the level of energy demand that is always present in the grid. E.g. if a grid consumes 5 GW of electricity at peak demand, and 4 GW at minimum demand, then 4 GW is the base load.
Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.