It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).
> so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward
Possibly, but nuclear TCO is also extremely well understood, and it's possible that the TCO for these new systems is not. I'd say the error bars are likely to be much longer on the renewables for the next 20 years or so, as we flush out the details.
> It doesn’t make much sense to compare the average outputs of wind vs nuclear unless you budget for a bunch of storage too.
It depends. If you're adding wind or nuclear to an already existing grid (which is usually the case), the already existing power plants can usually take over whenever the new power plants are offline or generating less power, and you don't need to budget for any extra storage. In these cases, the average output is the most relevant metric; it shows how much fuel (for a mostly fossil fuel grid) or water (for a mostly hydroelectric grid) it will save.
Possibly, but the discussion is about price per MW of nuclear vs wind, and I'm saying that's not a great comparison between generation types if you want power delivered all the time. 50% capacity is worth much less than 50% of the cost of 100% capacity.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).