...to pretend that this lack of reliability can be addressed, but this one is stranger than most.

One of the issues with so called "renewable energy" - and one that reduces its flexibility for use - is that it doesn't provide heat as a primary source, except in Rube Goldberg schemes like the tragic wilderness destruction mess at Ivanpah, which relies on gas to make it less useless.

This is of course, unless one is talking about clear cutting huge stretches of forest to burn them in boilers, something I personally oppose.

Thermal storage has some thermodynamic advantages over destructive junk like batteries and hydrogen, and, as such, the issue is being explored for the Terrapower nuclear plant in Wyoming for which ground breaking is underway For so called "renewable energy," though, it's just more handwaving, wishful thinking and day dreaming of the type that has left our planet in flames, with well over 50 ppm added to the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ in this century while we all made excuses for the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" to act as anything but lipstick on the fossil fuel pig.

We need less Rube Goldberg and more of a sense of reality.

He has seventeen bricks in his furnace. The bricks are heated in off-peak hours. A fluid is warmed by passing through the bricks and cycled through tubes in the concrete floor. The heat then rises into the rooms heating objects, not necessarily the air.

Its not a new technology.

The functional idiot Amory Lovins was talking about something similar in the last quarter of the 20th century, molten salt tanks in every suburban backyard.

If you poke any "100% renewable energy" fantasy with a dull stick, it crumbles into dust.