[tonyarkles]

While I don't have any links handy, my understanding from doing some digging into this a few months ago is that currently off-shore wind is awesome and has about a 40% capacity factor. On-shore not so much.

As far as the battery capacity and pricing goes, that math was done using the Wikipedia pricing for Tesla Megapacks quite recently.

The vast majority of sources I've found for trying to actually compare prices typically involves levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE), which as far as I can tell completely ignores the intermittency problem; that's where I did a dive into the battery storage prices and found them eye-wateringly bad.

I'm strongly not opposed to wind and solar; I'm just strongly suspicious of anyone who suggests that, in my climate and geography, we're capable of replacing all of our electricity generation and heating (currently natgas) with solar and wind without some form of baseload long-term backup. I prefer that baseload backup to be nuclear and not coal or natural gas, as is the current status quo here.

I did just do a relative cursory search to try to find some current numbers but the majority of articles had theses like "wind is struggling due to inflation and interest rates but is going to bounce back this year!" so that's... not super useful.

[matthewdgreen]

Battery prices have collapsed 60% in the last year. Tesla Megapacks from whenever you calculated them aren’t even close to competitive now. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...

[tonyarkles]

That's awesome but assuming that that means getting Tesla Megapacks at half the price (inverters and infrastructure would likely prevent a 60% reduction and it makes the math easier), you're now getting 16 hours at 300MW out of your batteries for the same price as a 300MW nuclear plant that runs 18-24 months before refuelling.