Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?"
But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
There will be when it’s needed in a decade or two. Right now solar farms installed recently have years to go until they’re decommissioned. There’s already processes for it.
There’s the direct answer to your question, cost of installed grid battery storage are getting cheaper by the user and it’s completely viable option at present. It’s not some vague fantasy idea like power plants in space or something, just look at California’s energy mix during peaks that in just a few years has become dominated by solar+batteries.
For longer periods of low-sun in a climate like Ireland see the other renewable options he mentioned. Plus a couple natural gas plants for fallback that can comfortably sit idle until needed.
If some combo of renewables are used 90% of the time when possible, no one is going to be mad about modern clean-burning LNG plants compared to a toxic, expensive relic of the past like coal.
Current trends make it clear the future will be renewables, grid battery storage, and however many natural gas plants are needed for reliability based on local climate (plus keeping nuclear online if you already have it). And that “future” is pretty much here already in places like California.
Places like California, which is right up there w/ Tunisia as the best-case scenario for solar, will have so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills there to take advantage.
Any day now, for sure.
No one ever claimed CA would have “so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills”.
Your “concern” was that there is no non-fantasy means to deal with transient output of solar or other renewables, I showed you how that is being implemented in the real world as we speak to deal with CA’s notorious peak evening load without blackouts. And it will only become more cost effective over time thanks to economies of scale.
CA has just started bringing grid storage online in the last few years but it’s already making an appreciable difference during peak times that in the past years resulted in blackouts.
It shows the clear, achievable path to a renewable + battery (+ nat gas) future that’s 95% renewables and highly resilient. Grid storage isn’t a “10 years away” fantasy like anti-renewable advocates might wish and it’s the critical piece to make those plans possible.
They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.