[cogman10]

They all suffer from the same problem, none of them are ramping sources. You need a peaker plant for all of them (though, you'll need more for solar and wind).

Storage is a problem that simply needs to be solved for any green solution. Nuclear and wind included.

A big issue is that solar, wind, and nuclear simply don't play well together. Nuclear wants to be a base load, solar and wind push down the maximum base load feasible.

Without storage to smooth out the demand curve, you can't efficiently operate either.

[DennisP]

The question isn't whether you'll need storage at all. It's whether it's cheaper to build enough storage for windless nights, or baseload nuclear and enough storage for remaining demand discrepancies.

I think the latter is more feasible without too much wind, since solar predictably goes to zero when demand is lowest. I don't think it's at all clear that a grid with high amounts of wind instead of nuclear would be cheaper.

[cogman10]

Yeah, hard to tell given the dramatic drop in storage costs.

Today, I agree that if we could make the switch overnight that solar + storage would probably be a lot more expensive than nuclear + storage.

However, who knows in 10 years. I could see liquid metal batteries becoming extremely economical.