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by evandijk70 339 days ago
I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).

Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.

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Or some combination of the two. Obviously sounds expensive but 20 years ago this would have been fiction. I think it’s entirely likely that energy storage and production will continue to fall enough in price to make this realistic.