I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid.

Solar is still negligible in terms of penetration in many places in the world (even though it and wind are the cheapest new build primary energy today, so expect this to rapidly change). As well, you can add quite a bit of solar to a grid before curtailments become necessary.

Add that solar and wind pair together (when it’s not sunny, it’s often windy and visa versa). Many grids today (Uk, Denmark, Germany, etc) can have decent penetration of renewables with 0 energy storage.

Add in large scale grid interconnectivity (sunny in Nevada, windy in Idaho, Hydro in pacific north west) it will always be sunny and windy somewhere.

> I will challenge your assertion that energy storage is some kind of “deterministic barrier” that needs to be crossed before decarbonizing our grid.

This is clearly not my assertion.

My bet is that large scale storage is a much, much easier problem to solve than power-generating nuclear fusion.

Yes, but that does not change anything to the point of the importance of nuclear (fission) power.

That depends on how quickly you think the storage problem can be solved. If it can be solved in 10 years then it makes little sense to build more nuclear (fission) capacity, because it will be obsolete by the time it is built.

Storage is only part of the problem, though a big one. The area that needs to be covered with solar panels and windmills is another one.

> The area that needs to be covered with solar panels and windmills is another one.

I don't really see that as a huge problem. There's loads of free area for solar panels on rooftops. Sure, it's more expensive to build solar there. But that's not even an engineering problem, it's simply a matter of allocating funds to it. And most of the cost is labour. Which is arguably a bit of a bonus in a world where we're constantly worrying about there not being enough jobs.