[cpleppert]

None of those sources has any relevance to the bottom line accounting cost of large scale utility storage for intermittent renewable energy. You presumably have to over provision both storage and baseline power generation to assure the grid of enough reliability. The assumptions you make in doing that drive the cost of the entire solution.

Lazard has mostly ignored those costs when it tries to come up with a LCOE for intermittent renewables. A real world grid operator can't ignore those costs. To take a real world example, Germany requires dramatic subsidies to build out its renewable energy portfolio. These subsidies occur at every level of electricity grid. There is no simple way to untangle the costs and come up with a single number that can be compared to non-intermittent sources of energy. The share of biomass in the German grid is strongly suggestive of the fact that renewable energy isn't cost competitive without significant subsidies.

There is no free lunch, decarbonizing energy generation requires more expensive sources of energy.