[Miraste]

The biggest thing it has going for it is constant power without fossil fuels. The grid needs backing power. I've seen a lot of other efforts at this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) there are still none that work, scale, and are affordable.

[rswail]

The grid needs consistent power that is transferrable and responsive to load.

Point sources like nuclear plants add baseload, but are not flexible in supply.

A more resilient grid will have much more interconnection between sources and sinks and much more dynamic control and feedback loops.

Solar power is currently the cheapest form of new power available, it is limited by the hours of daylight.

Wind power is weather limited, but offshore wind power can provide relatively constant generation.

Batteries and equivalent energy storage (eg pumped hydro) provide the short term grid stability requirements that are currently provided by gas-powered peak plants, but with much faster response time and much cheaper capex and opex costs.

As rooftop solar and household battery (including stationary vehicles) expand, dynamic usage will also capture a lot of the energy market from large baseload generation.

All of these are affordable now, work, and, with investment in the grid/network, scale.

[Miraste]

I should have phrased that differently; my understanding is that the problem isn't whether renewable energy is relatively affordable, it's whether it beats natural gas plants, and that so far the generation part does but the storage does not--the reason Germany's removal of nuclear energy resulted in an increase in fossil fuel use.

[pydry]

Germany's increase of fossil fuel use was temporary. It's been going down since about 2017.

[8note]

The backing power requirement is speed though. Nuclear plants are slow to start up and shut down.

Nat gas plants that can be swapped out for storage solutions makes the most sense to me to solve that problem.