[malpighien]

I don't think here are available storage solution for renewables and even if there was it would need to be a solution scalable without a risk of running out of resources to make the batteries. Renewables are great but they work on the shoulders of nuclear/coal which need to pick up the load when there is no sun/wind. Renewables feel like paying more for getting less with different but not necessarily less pollution issues.

[mrec]

Storage doesn't have to mean batteries. I'd have thought approaches like pumped hydro [1] could scale pretty well. I vaguely recall a similar story from a couple of years back that basically involved lifting giant concrete blocks.

[1] http://www.british-hydro.org/pumped-storage/

[malpighien]

If those solutions were viable at scale then countries like germany or england using lot of renewables and coal (gas or gb) would have been using them already.

[pfdietz]

They'd only be using them now if they cost less than gas + current carbon taxes.

The question is: at what level of carbon taxes would nuclear displace gas, vs. what level would renewables + storage displace gas. In the US, CO2 taxes would have to exceed $300/ton for new nuclear to displace gas CC baseload, and for intermittent applications the needed tax would be far higher.

[adrianN]

The most scalable storage that I know of is making Hydrogen or Methane and using the existing infrastructure for strategic gas reserves to store it.