[DennisP]

Energy storage is not all that cheap.

There's a reason I mentioned "cloudy winter days." The cheapest way to address those is probably to overbuild PV. That overcapacity probably won't be used on bright summer days, raising the capital cost of PV across the board.

I don't think you're going to find many factories that can be economically shut down for entire seasons. None of this is an issue right now because we use natural gas for backup, but we need to stop doing that.

[ZeroGravitas]

The cheapest way to generate power on cloudy winter days is wind power, not overbuilt solar. Though, yes, overbuilding wind and solar is generally more cost effective than most other alternatives and the overbuilt wind and solar will both contribute power even when not working at their seasonal peak and provide abundant cheap power for storage when overproducing near their peaks.

I had assumed we were both taking that as the baseline alternative, since every country in the world is basically building that out right now, hence my suggestion that demand response would be a better choice than any plausible nuclear option to cover any gaps in that provision due to unseasonal weather which is both less windy and more cloudy than predicted.

But we appear to be starting from radically different assumptions about what power grids will look like (and already look like today)

[DennisP]

Yes, we have a lot of wind power, but that also is backed by fossil.

[pfdietz]

Hydrogen burned in combustion turbines would likely be cheaper. For this use case minimizing capital cost is all important; the cost of the hydrogen itself much less so.