Carful when saying it’s not cheaper, it’s generally profitable to add some batteries to a solar power plant.
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.
I've always been confused by the insistence on storage. Saturate 100% of the daytime loads with solar, curtail at peak, it's still cheaper than just about any other source. Save all the hydro power, gas, and other standby sources for before and after sunset.
Once you're curtailing a bunch of power during the daytime, then you can add storage as a no brainer bonus and stop curtailing.
Yes, and if peak solar generation exceeded demand, and were priced appropriately, I think we'd find that some workloads could be timeshifted (e.g. precooling homes).
Saturation of daytime loads with solar kills nuclear by lowering its capacity factor or daytime pricing, which some people object to.
It’s clearly a net win environmentally and economically, but for anyone who sees nuclear as part of a green future storage in some form is a massive requirement.
> Saturation of daytime loads with solar kills nuclear
If you exclude China, effectively no nuclear plants have been built in the last decade, and the existing fleet is aging out. "We shouldn't do this thing, because it might threaten that other thing that we don't do anymore" is a weird argument.
But yea building nuclear is all about forecasting the future so most of the damage has already occurred here, still advocates are going to advocate even if what they say doesn’t make sense.
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.