If you’ve spent much time discussing clean energy on the internet, you’ve probably come across a disturbing piece of information: the sun, it seems, is not always shining. What’s worse, the wind is not always blowing! It’s crazy, I know. Unlike coal or natural gas or nuclear — “dispatchable” power plants that we can turn on or off at will, when we need them — we do not control solar power and wind power. They come and go with the weather and the rotation of heavenly bodies. They are, to use the term of art, “variable.” Many people, bringing to bear varying levels of good faith, conclude from this fact that we shouldn’t or can’t shift to an electricity system that is based around wind and solar, at least not without occasionally shivering in the cold. Is that true? Do we know how to balance out the variability of wind and solar enough that we can fully decarbonize the grid with them? This is probably the number one question I hear about renewable energy, the number one reservation people have about it, so I decided it’s time to tackle it head on.To help, I called on longtime Friend of Volts, Princeton professor and energy modeler extraordinaire Jesse Jenkins. We walked through the basic shape of the problem, the different time scales on which variability operates, and the solutions that we either have or anticipate having to deal with it. This one is long and occasionally gets a bit complex, but if you’ve ever wondered how we’re going to build an energy system around wind and solar, this is the pod you’ve been waiting for. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe