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by jabpattern7 604 days ago
Backed by batteries is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Batteries required to make them viable are never included in the LCOEs for renewable, because it'd make them ridiculously more expensive than nuclear. The problem is we need power now, all the time. It's much easier to develop new technologies when the lights are still on.
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Even backed by batteries renewables are still winning. How good things look depends on how much battery you decide to include, but fortunately we don't need that much battery, especially while we still have some legacy dispatchable generation.

It "helps" that nuclear is just so slow and expensive to get going that everything else just ends up looking pretty good. If it were cheap, fast and safe that would have been great, though.

Lazard had figures that include a couple of hours of storage for years. https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
It's not true that batteries are required to make renewables work.

In Australia solar is popular because it produces power at the same time it is needed for A/C, computers, manufacturing etc.

There really isn't the need for huge amounts of baseload power. Hence why batteries are used.