We do have a good way to store energy. It's called batteries, they are already cost effective in several use cases, and their cost is going down about 5% per year.

The US has about 8 seconds worth of battery storage. By comparison, to use renewables for 80% of our electricity we would need 12 hours of energy storage. For 100%, 3 weeks of storage [1]. 1 hour of energy storage in the US is 500 GWh. This amounts to more than the sum total of global lithium iron battery production (currently about 300 GWh) [2].

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

2. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/02/world-battery-producti...

Critically, batteries aren't cost effective for the use case in question: storing solar and wind energy in a world where these are the primary energy sources. They're going down 5% per year, but who knows how long that trend will hold, especially if we're talking about a wide-scale switch to unreliable power sources (driving up the demand for batteries).

I want to live in a world powered by solar and wind, but we can't just wish away the reliability issues. And I don't think we should keep burning fossil fuels while we chip away at the storage problem. And we don't have to--we can build nuclear plants while we work on the storage problem.

As an aside, I think it would be really cool if something like Energy Vault (https://energyvault.com/) could be the solution (at least for the majority of use cases); however, I have no idea how feasible it is.

I have played around with a simulator for this. Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power that you can simple build a lot of overcapacity to deal with much of the storage issue. Wind almost never go to zero during a year.

For the rest of the time you just use gas power plants. According to my calculations I could get lower kWh price than with nuclear and only provide 10-20% of the power from natural gas.

We can run on 10-20% natural gas for a while until we develop better storage.

> Wind and solar is so much cheaper than nuclear power

Could you please cite a source for this extraordinary claim?

That is not an extraordinary claim. This is well know. Look up levelized cost of energy on Wikipedia e.g. or lookup the latest British Government report on current and projected Energy cost.

I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling.

Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.

> I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling.

God... so frustrating dealing with dumbasses that don't know even the most basic shit about energy production and cost. Not sure if you are just trolling. But here goes. Here are costs by different sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Costs will vary between country. But here is cost e.g. for France. Nuclear EPR is 100 euro/MWh. Solar farms is 43.24 euro/MWh.

Next, the UK. Nuclear PWR is 93-121 pounds/MWh. Onshore wind 47-76 pounds/MWh. Solar 71-94 pounds/MWh.

How about the US. Advanced Nuclear 71-92 dollars/MWh. Onshore Wind 28 to 62 dollars/MWh. Solar 29 to 48 dollars/MWh.

Here are the estimates from British BEIS: https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper...

> Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.

Said nobody ever. Solar and wind are dirty cheap hence any clean energy system will have to try to use as much of these as possible to save money where possible. We can supplement with geothermal, hydropower, biomass, power-to-gas, compress air storage, flow batteries, metal powder combustion, and even SMR with molten salt thermal energy storage.

Your own sources, if you dig into them, conveniently split generation costs (of which Lazard's cited report says that wind and solar generation is competitive only when subsidized by the US government) with storage costs. If you factor storage costs into the equation, your economy would look way different. Lazard has a report on storage costs too.

I'm withdrawing from further discussion due to your petty manner to use insults instead of arguments.

Insults are there because you said I made false claims and lacked sources. That is basically calling me a liar.

The sources was easy to look up. Claiming storage costs must be included is moving the goalpost.

Gas power plant plus wind is e.g. a perfectly valid choice which cause significant CO2 reductions, and which is entirely cost competitive. Biomass is another viable choice.

Many places hydro plus wind and solar is a viable choice.

For many using you EV will provide you with storage for a very low cost. With Tesla’s million mile battery, there is minimal cost to using EV battery cycles to power your house when the sun doesn’t shine.

Point is, there are tons options and choices and so claiming wind and solar must be paired with storage is disingenuous.

Don't oversell them. Batteries as they are today are much too expensive to cover all needs. You need a way to store weeks of power consumption for large areas. Batteries are too capital intensive for that. They can take the role of peaker plants, but they are currently unsuited for storing energy for dark, windstill winter weeks. For that other technology, for example Power-to-Gas is needed currently.

When people talk about the cost of solar they ignore the price of batteries and underestimate the amount of batteries required. Watch this video about renewables in California[0]. The video mentions a study that would put the cost of energy storage required for California to be 100% on renewables would be over $3.6 trillion which is equivalent to an entire year's GDP for the state. The video author explained that study's methodology got that number by assuming enough to store excess capacity during the summer to provide power in winter when not enough would be generated on most days. This isn't great because li-on batteries are not great for long term storage and would lose power over time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY

A Tesla model 3 can power a regular house for around 4 days. It comes with bidirectional charging and so does plenty of other modern EVs. Tesla is soon coming with their million miles battery which makes this even more feasible.

You charge the car to the max while the sun shines and drain it when the sun does not shine.