I expect batteries could get pretty cheap if made in the volume we'd need to power whole cities through the night. But for now there's not so much reason to build those because the proportion of power that comes from renewables is so low that excess production is rarely a problem. There's not much incentive to store solar power for the nighttime when you can sell all that power during the day and people still have to run fossil fuel and nuclear to make up the difference. I suppose as the proportion of solar goes up, the price of daytime electricity will drop and it'll be more attractive to use batteries.

(Places with significant hydroelectric might not even need much storage if they just run water through the turbines at night, or whenever they have a shortfall. Or even pump water back uphill when there's a surplus.)

Batteries are already not really production constrained, lithium based batteries are more supply constrained than anything else the current global supply of lithium isn’t going to sustain current growth rates unless we start extracting lithium from the oceans.

This is one of the primary drivers for alternative chemistries and non battery energy storage such as green hydrogen and kinetic or thermal storage.

Hydroelectric isn’t relevant for the vast majority of the population and hydroelectric that doesn’t have a severe impact on the environment is even rarer.

Not many countries have the topology and water sources as Sweden.

We should’ve been building and advancing nuclear reactors since the 80’s instead we had the likes of Greenpeace blocking coolant intakes and outflow pipes to nuclear plants and the Greens in countries like Germany running a hybrid war against nuclear power for decades.

> Anyone who claims to be an environmentalist who is against nuclear power doesn't really believe warming is a threat.

Also, their funding profile could inform their stance.

I think what you're saying has been true in the past: estimates of the cost of solar energy have often overlooked storage. But that has been changing, thanks to people like you raising it as a concern.

There are now some fairly good estimates including these 2020 calculations by the International Energy Agency that illustrate that onshore wind, utility-scale solar, and hydro are competitive with nuclear power:

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...

Solar, wind and hydro power all benefit from relatively short (and safe) construction times and (as I naively understand it) usually require less complicated on-site security, maintenance and monitoring.

It feels like there is a large opportunity for renewable sources of energy to gain momentum and scale up.