>>13550891>>13550898Actually read what I wrote, you retard(s). You need more power capacity during winter, to account for less light, not necessarily more storage. The cheapest way is by adding a bunch of solar panels while leaving everything else the same.
>>13550903It's entirely dependent on the level of renewable penetration in the market, there are places when peak demand happens exactly when it's hot and sunny, so there is no slack to pick up during off-peak. Until the penetration is so high that solar produces 100% of the energy during solar noon on a clear day, as it's the cheapest so it underbids everything else and forces them to shut down or sell at a loss, there is zero requirement for storage.
>natural gasNatural gas is only good for load following now, not peakers as batteries offer much better performance at a lower cost. As solar capacity gets added and battery prices fall it will become more economical to store energy to use during the night. It's likely that solar including 12-hour storage will end up far cheaper than anything else.
>thermodynamically inefficient Not a metric worth considering, what truly matters is cost, but it is odd that the thermal energy to electricity conversion rate of nuclear is never mentioned...
>>13550912Contrary to popular belief, solar and nuclear don't mix well to any real extent, it's going to be one or the other taking the majority of the market. This is because nuclear plants have extremely high capital costs so they need to have a high capacity factor if they want to pay off the plant over the service life. If solar is cheaper than nuclear during the day, they're forced to either sell at a loss or stop selling energy during this time and their capacity factor decreases substantially. Nuclear no longer makes any sense economically, which is partly why it's stagnating so much and few new plants are getting built. No, fusion won't change this.
