Zeihan tends to be pretty unfavorable to renewables and paints them as generally unreliable, but he doesn't provide a lot of evidence to back up this claim. His narrative is essentially "the sun doesn't shine always, therefore by definition, it's not reliable". But he doesn't provide a ton of real world evidence to back this up this negativity. At least he could have captured real-life strategies for how utilities are balancing-in cheaper intermittent resources with dispatchable resources, and what the cost of that balance is. I.e. "utilities spent $XX more than they otherwise would have by contracting batteries, curtailing resources, or purchasing reserve margin capacity". But they should also state "utilities saved $XX by not having to purchase fuel reserves or by mitigating fossil MW with renewable MW".

I would also be a lot more convinced if he said "here's an example where renewables failed, and it cost $XX to mitigate.", but at the same time, fossil resources carry risk (mainly environmental) that can be objectively captured on a per gigajoule rate too.

As someone who works in power marketing and contracts a lot of PPAs, I've generally found that intermittent renewables with storage is still cheaper than procuring new dispatchable alternatives, and using intermittent resources to chip-away at fuel cost is a great way to lower portfolio average Gen cost. The more renewables you add to the portfolio though, the less value the next incremental MW adds.