[funklute]

I had to look up what a dunkelflaute is... but the last bit you said:

> i.e. dunkelflauts in winter which neither batteries or nuclear particularly help with.

doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Wikipedia defines a dunkelflaute as "a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power". Isn't that precisely where you have to fall back to nuclear, battery, or fossil fuels?

Also:

> Batteries have already solved baseload for most of the planet

this runs contrary to a lot of what I've read about the topic (which doesn't mean I lot, I know -- I'm not an expert). Do you have a source I could have a look at?

[ZeroGravitas]

It doesn't make financial sense to build batteries or nuclear to fill in a variable gap that probably won't exceed 4 weeks, and might not even happen in any particular year (or decade if you have cross country links).

It doesn't even make environmental sense compared with fossil based methane (though greener methane sources are available).

See https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8 for a real time simulation of how Australia would cope with 5 hours of battery storage (he has some in depth articles that go through his methodology too).

[funklute]

And am I correct that these dunkelflautes are becoming an increasing concern because of the increased likelihood of extreme weather events? Otherwise I don't really see why this is suddenly a bigger concern now, than it was, say, 50 years ago...?

> See https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8 for a real time simulation of how Australia would cope with 5 hours of battery storage

Forgive me for being sceptical, but you did state that batteries have solved base load for most of the planet. Australia is probably the least convincing example anyone could pick, due to its extremely low population density, long coastline, and high amount of sun hours. I'd be much more interested in seeing this calculation for places like China, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia.

[ZeroGravitas]

Most of the world's population lives equally or nearer to the equator than Australia.

Australia has a head start on solar mostly due to low costs of capital letting people invest long term. Same reason Northern Europe deploys more solar than you'd think is globally sensible.