If weather reports show overcast and low winds, and your grid runs on wind/solar power only, who cares about their electricity bill? There won't be any kWh available to consume.
Oh, I see. You are handwaving away the nonexistent storage tech required to stand up a power grid. Please stop.
The fact is that without inventing new storage tech, which might or might not be possible, the only options for powering the world are nuclear or burning more carbon.
Personally, I'd rather humans still have a viable habitat in a century.
> You are handwaving away the nonexistent storage tech required to stand up a power grid. Please stop.
This isn't true.
If you accept 5% non-renewable power generation (which - lets face it - will be with us for a while!) you need storage at $150/kWh to use renewables for everything else[1].
This price is available now (and forecast to drop below $100/kWh next year)[2].
Ah yes, the usual passive aggressive approach of dismissing contrary ideas that have not been fully confirmed with 100% certainty. And yet you guys never apply this to nuclear.
They're not trying to model a hypothetical technology. They're using hypothetical technological estimates as the input for their model of how much carbon would be emitted.
Of course they're trying to model a hypothetical technology, "affordable nuclear". Large cost reductions are handwaved on the basis of "less regulation" and "experience curves". Never mind there's little or no basis for believing in any of that.
All these storage technologies exist. The churn right now is to figure out what flavor of storage is going to win, and how much they will end up costing after they go down their experience curves. But if some aliens held a gun to our heads and insisted we build storage now, it could be done.
The weirdness from you guys, thinking that obviously existent things don't exist.
Hydrogen storage exists on PowerPoint slides that usually slightly understate the overhead required to build new, or adapt current gas infrastructure. Spoiler: those problems are not trivial to overcome. That's why they're mostly PowerPoint projects.
Hydro storage works, and along with hydro power, it is usually well exploited in countries that can benefit from it (e.g. alpine). Problem is you tend to run out of valleys and villages to flood after a certain point.
Why chase paper or limited impact solutions when massively available and clean ones already exist?
At least you seem to be admitting these are actual technologies. We are now just haggling over the cost.
The estimates for the costs of storage needed to turn renewables into baseload aren't enormous. This is why Exelon abandoned the idea of building more nuclear power plants, and instead focused on storage.
BTW, the available locations for off-river pumped hydro are enormous. On a global scale it vastly exceeds what would be necessary for a 100% renewable world. There are areas without the vertical relief needed, but other storage technologies could work there.
The salient thing you see when looking at storage is that there are so many different ways to do it. Nuclear stans are loudly asserting that none of them can work. This is a very strong assertion and deserves much more detailed argument than the usual bare assertion.
Batteries are more expensive than the power itself.
Pumped hydro is severely capacity limited and is likewise limited by available water--even if you have a place to pump it you have to have spare water to pump there. Realistically, pumped hydro exists to allow powering up slower generators, not as a meaningful energy storage.
