[sir_bearington]

Neither of these articles offers a detailed plan on how this storage will be provisioned. The second doesn't even mention storage at all, only that Europe has enough wind power to power the whole world. Sure, but that's not very useful if that power isn't delivered when you need it.

[7952]

Easy. Create a market that makes it profitable to build storage and encourages price reduction.

[sir_bearington]

I like framing the problem in this term. Our ultimate goal is decarbonization: $1 million per gram of C02 emitted unless equivalent mass is sequestered.

Do we have a realistic plan to built a wind and solar grid under that market? I don't think so, wind and solar are useful for taking a bite out of natural gas but not actually serving as the backbone of an electrical grid. The amount of storage necessary to decarbonize with wind and solar is not feasible, and essentially amounts to betting on some future invention of a cheap mass energy storage device that works everywhere.

By comparison we have demonstrable examples of countries going 80+% nuclear, and the US is already at 20% nuclear power generation. Building four nuclear plants for each existing plant is a lot more achievable of a goal than first building a massive amount of solar and wind, and building extensive HVDC transmission, and building tens of Terawatt hours worth of storage. The first step in the latter is cheaper than building nuclear, it's the other two steps that are wildly expensive if they're even possible. If we actually enacted a binding rule of zero emissions by 2050 people would start building nuclear power plants.