[ben_w]

Nuclear is, last I checked, the same cost as the combination of PV with a sufficient number of batteries to be the backup.

And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV.

The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.

[goneri]

During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days. Meanwhile, this is the moment of the year where the global consumption is the highest. We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.

Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.

[ben_w]

> During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days.

Depends where you are. If, for example, you're in the most-occupied bits of Canada, your grid connects to the south side of the USA, which gets rather more hours of sun than you do.

> We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.

If you're far enough south to get as many as "a couple of hours" of sun each day in midwinter, this isn't a serious issue in most cases. Why? Because adding more PV is much cheaper than adding more batteries — when you've got 2.4 hours of sun, build a 24*n hour battery and enough PV to charge that battery in 2.4 hours, where n is some factor for "in my location, there are often n-day cloudy streaks".

But also, most places already have a decent grid (exceptions exist, Hawaii is excusable, Texas is not), the grids are not fundamentally so lossy as to break the economics here, and much better grids can be made if there's sufficient political will behind it (yes, even one that worked for Hawaii).