[ip26]

Among other things, when it gets really cheap you can start over-provisioning. Cloud cover sometimes cuts the solar irradiance in half? No problem, just build twice as much solar capacity (and maybe add a HVDC transmission line to the next state over for the high production times)

Wide deployment & interconnection will also erase some of the local variability of, e.g. a cloud passing over.

[keanzu]

Land use of solar prevents it ever getting really cheap. According to the UK solar power portal [1]: "If solar covered one percent of the UK it would meet the country’s entire power demand".

> just build twice as much solar capacity

This would increase the land use from 1% to 2%. That's a huge amount of the country to give over to power production.

[1] https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/if_solar_covered_one...

[pjc50]

It's a reasonable fraction of total roof area, I believe.

But the real problem with the UK and solar is not nighttime but seasonality. No, we need to keep going with the wind buildout and not drop the tidal energy programme.

We're getting there: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon...

[esotericn]

The UK has a lot of unused land on a percentage basis.

Granted, half of that will be in Scotland and ideally your solar would be further south, but even then, you're probably talking about switching less than 5% of the arable land to solar.

[ourlordcaffeine]

Overprovisioning in the case of the UK really applies to wind rather than solar.

[kortilla]

Does the UK not experience night time?