For the aluminium processing type plants issue, it appears steel plants and other heavy industry here in the Netherlands are investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities. Exactly so that they can operate on their own terms instead of the net having to develop a generic power storing solution.
Indonesia is gigantic has a huge population and will have a massive amount energy needs. If not nuclear this will be coal. And those plants have 50 year lifetime at least.
The reality is that climate change will be decided in India, Indonesia and China more then anywhere else. If they can actually adopt nuclear and be a pro nuclear society they have the potential to have game changing impact.
Indonesia in particular has gigantic amount of people living at the cost. So an approach where you do centralized building and then ship the plants to the population makes a lot of sense. And Indonesia by itself is big enough that its actually worth building such a model. They will need 100s of GWs of reactors if they want to reach Western standards of power consumption.
> investing in their own power/heat storage capabilities
Yes and that costs a lot of money. Europe is also in a Europe wide power net with lots of nuclear, coal and renewables. Doing that in such a system is much more doable then in Indonesia.
Storage and distribution of synthethic liquid fuels such as ammonia will probably be best adapted to Indonesian needs.
And even the basic infrastructure of the grid that is absolutely required for renewables to be even remotely practical doesn't exist.
Wasting gigantic amounts of energy to produce chemical fuel highly inefficiently with low utility plants, and then transporting them around to then burn them up again highly inefficiently is a terrible plan to power a country of 100s of millions of people.
"Waste" is a curious concept applied to something with zero marginal cost. If not used to synthesize fuel, the insolation would have been wasted. Instead, it synthesizes useful fuel, that also fuels the ship taking it where it is needed.
Indonesia will be able to build their own solar farms and synthesizers, and end up exporting their excess in the temperate countries' winter, provided they can escape the grip of the oligarchists.
And then the need to build storage to capture some of that energy and also peaker plants to cover that.
Given those countries are barley able to but up coal plants right now, and are massively lacking in the power infrastructure to wildly distribute wind/solar power that seems like an incredibly hard plan.
If you can just get 1 working nuclear reactor design (even if its an old PWR) to the point where you can build and run it. Over then next 10-30 years you can just build them as fast as you can next to every large city and provide reliable power.
> aluminium plants retooled to use excess energy.
The problem with that is that if you are an aluminium plant you want to run at high utility. You don't want to continuously! Not turn it on and off 3 times a day. Those kinds of installations are hard enough to run with reliable power.